Experience is like hemlock; small quantities over time eventually make you invulnerable. – Posted from my iPhone

by Peter Schmitt If he had been paying more attentionto whatever my mother was sayingfrom under her hat beneath the umbrella, or watching more closely over my brother,off playing somewhere with his shovel and pail,or me, idly tracing my name in the sand, if he hadn’t had that faraway look,gazing out to where the freighters crawled alongthe horizon – so that when he suddenly pushed up and off, sand in his wake, visortaking wing behind him, you could believe,as he churned toward the glassy water, that it had just come to him to chuck it all,this whole idea of family, and makefor those southbound freighters and the islands – then…