The red glint of paint sparkled under the sun.

He had dreamed of owning this car since he was ten,

and that dream had become a reality less than a year ago. It was his baby and he spent hours

caring for it, pampering it, and fondling over it. She knew this all too well, and that's exactly why she

had taken a sludge hammer to it.

She looked at her student wondering if she could ever get through. "You need to learn to think for

yourself," she wanted to tell him. "Your friends are holding you back and bringing you down." But

she didn't because she knew his friends were all that he had and even if that meant a life of misery,

he would never give them up.

There wasn't a bird in the sky, but that was not what caught her attention. It was the clouds. The

deep green that isn't the color of clouds, but came with these. She knew what was coming and she

hoped she was prepared.

"Explain to me again why I shouldn't cheat?" he asked. "All the others do and nobody ever gets

punished for doing so. I should go about being happy losing to cheaters because I know that I don't?

That's what you're telling me?"

Sometimes there isn't a good answer. No matter how you try to rationalize the outcome, it doesn't

make sense. And instead of an answer, you are simply left with a question. Why?

It was a rat's nest. Not a literal one, but that is what her hair seemed to resemble every morning

when she got up. It was going to take at least an hour to get it under control and she was sick and

tired of it. She peered into the mirror and wondered if it was worth it. It wasn't. She opened the

drawer and picked up the hair clippers.

She tried to explain that love wasn't like pie. There wasn't a set number of slices to be given out.
There wasn't less to be given to one person if you wanted to give more to another. That after a set

amount was given out it would all disappear. She tried to explain this, but it fell on deaf ears.

She sat in the darkened room waiting. It was now a standoff. He had the power to put her in the

room, but not the power to make her repent. It wasn't fair and no matter how long she had to endure

the darkness, she wouldn't change her attitude. At three years old, Sandy's stubborn personality had

already bloomed into full view.

His parents continued to question him. He didn't know what to say to them since they refused to

believe the truth. He explained again and again, and they dismissed his explanation as a figment of

his imagination. There was no way that grandpa, who had been dead for five years, could have told

him where the treasure had been hidden. Of course, it didn't help that grandpa was roaring with

laughter in the chair next to him as he tried to explain once again how he'd found it.

Sometimes that's just the way it has to be. Sure, there were probably other options, but he didn't let

them enter his mind. It was done and that was that. It was just the way it had to be.

Since they are still preserved in the rocks for us to see, they must have been formed quite recently,

that is, geologically speaking. What can explain these striations and their common orientation? Did

you ever hear about the Great Ice Age or the Pleistocene Epoch? Less than one million years ago,

in fact, some 12,000 years ago, an ice sheet many thousands of feet thick rode over Burke

Mountain in a southeastward direction. The many boulders frozen to the underside of the ice sheet

tended to scratch the rocks over which they rode. The scratches or striations seen in the park rocks

were caused by these attached boulders. The ice sheet also plucked and rounded Burke Mountain

into the shape it possesses today.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved
one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one?s

cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. One dollar

and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas...

All he could think about was how it would all end. There was still a bit of uncertainty in the equation,

but the basics were there for anyone to see. No matter how much he tried to see the positive, it

wasn't anywhere to be seen. The end was coming and it wasn't going to be pretty.

There once lived an old man and an old woman who were peasants and had to work hard to earn

their daily bread. The old man used to go to fix fences and do other odd jobs for the farmers around,

and while he was gone the old woman, his wife, did the work of the house and worked in their own

little plot of land.

There was a time when he would have embraced the change that was coming. In his youth, he

sought adventure and the unknown, but that had been years ago. He wished he could go back and

learn to find the excitement that came with change but it was useless. That curiosity had long left

him to where he had come to loathe anything that put him out of his comfort zone.

He took a sip of the drink. He wasn't sure whether he liked it or not, but at this moment it didn't

matter. She had made it especially for him so he would have forced it down even if he had

absolutely hated it. That's simply the way things worked. She made him a new-fangled drink each

day and he took a sip of it and smiled, saying it was excellent.

MaryLou wore the tiara with pride. There was something that made doing anything she didn't really

want to do a bit easier when she wore it. She really didn't care what those staring through the

window were thinking as she vacuumed her apartment.

ourselves in a sea of backwardly referential semantics and other mumbo-jumbo. Maybe such a

discussion would result in the determination that "meant to be" is exactly as meaningless a phrase

as it seems to be, and that none of us is actually meant to be doing anything at all. But that's my

existential underpants underpinnings showing. It's the way the cookie crumbles. And now I want a

cookie.

I recently discovered I could make fudge with just chocolate chips, sweetened condensed milk,

vanilla extract, and a thick pot on slow heat. I tried it with dark chocolate chunks and I tried it with

semi-sweet chocolate chips. It's better with both kinds. It comes out pretty bad with just the dark

chocolate. The best add-ins are crushed almonds and marshmallows -- what you get from that is

Rocky Road. It takes about twenty minutes from start to fridge, and then it takes about six months to

work off the twenty pounds you gain from eating it. All things in moderation, friends. All things in

moderation.

It was difficult to explain to them how the diagnosis of certain death had actually given him life. While

everyone around him was in tears and upset, he actually felt more at ease. The doctor said it would

be less than a year. That gave him a year to live, something he'd failed to do with his daily drudgery

of a routine that had passed as life until then.