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Letters from the Desert
 
To be honest, it didn't take all that much convincing that there is much on the line, more than I originally believed. The Doctor has a wide view of my state of affairs—it goes far beyond just my health.
 
Reed S. Fauver

 

Food for Freedom
 
In the beginning, when I come, I know how to braid hair, so sometimes at home I got one or two customers in the day, and I do this to pay my rent. And thereafter, our Abidjan community needed somebody to cook for them because our food, you can't get it here, so in 2002 I opened this business.
 
Andie Miller

 

Hey Nineteen
 
There are four Sam Adams in the refrigerator downstairs, standing guard by some kale and organic two-percent milk, and I swear I can hear those little soldiers clink together like small, soft bells. My shoulder joints ache. I sing along with Donald Fagan, "She thinks I'm crazy, but I'm just growin' old."
 
Joseph Gross

 

Kissing in Tandem
 
I was twelve when my cousin commanded me to kiss her best friend because she was "tired of hearing him moan" about me. We were the two youngest cousins from a large extended family, and despite my reputation as the family rebel, I was so used to being bossed around that it never occurred to me to refuse her.
 
Valerie Fioravanti

 

That Was It
 
I didn't enter the on-line lottery for tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial service at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, only a half hour's drive from my home, but watched the television broadcast instead. The program was produced by AEG, the world's largest owner of professional sports teams, owner of Staples Center and operator of London's O2 Arena, where Jackson's This Is It fifty-concert comeback tour, his first in over a decade, was scheduled to take place before it was aborted by his death.
 
Richard Bellikoff

 

Reasoning Unreason
 
For that which is out of control is what has broken away from our grasp and is, so to say, running amok. "Amok" is a Malay word meaning to "battle in fury, which people in Southeast Asia do, or used to do, when they had to act against the orderly, ceremonious life of cultivated ritual, the sanction of the complacent smile, the culture of shame, and the preservation of "face"—all the agreeable rigidities of a comparatively gentle culture in which an individual could not say, No!
 
Jascha Kessler

 

Back East And Glad Of It!
 
How energetic we were, what resources were at our command! In any review of that time of life, they still astonish. Without trepidation, we could undertake what faced us, bring forth enthusiasm for remote potentials, always with a certainty which only inexperience can provide.
 
Julia Braun Kessler