Miller Time

UNITED STATES—The drug store was a place where the community manifest itself. People could make any old comment about the weather and it would pass for wit, or they could rib my dad about his shirttail sticking out. That was an enduring, endearing sartorial feature of a man oblivious to the physical details of a shirttail sticking out. Once...

UNITED STATES—Whenever we were on a trip my dad would get anxious and phone the drug store. This seemed a gross interruption of our vacation time, reinforcing the ill feeling for the drug store. As I child, to tell you the truth, my sister and I loathed the drug store as something that robbed our dad from us. And...

UNITED STATES—Anybody who can take a cross-country trip with a dog and write a book has my respects. Mine is barely learning to let me read in peace. I have new respect for John Steinbeck. After a trip up north, I stopped in downtown Salinas to pay my respects and read part of a Swedish mystery which was just...

UNITED STATES—Newton was in the mist of a siesta, recovering from a rigorous morning of sun and much traffic, dropping off a screenplay with his agent and doing a couple errands. He was just pleasantly drifting off. Max came and shook him by the shoulders. In one hand, he held the feeding bowl he had dug out, still specked...

UNITED STATES—As the youngest of his children prepared to leave the nest—not tomorrow or the next day, but inevitably it would happen—the old vices came back, and a few new ones. The smoking (tobacco mostly) and drinking. Who's fooling whom? Kids see a lot now. In the middle school someone had to call 911 because a kid had overdosed...

UNITED STATES—The national holiday fell on a Tuesday. It was not one of the movable holidays, so there was a buoyant Monday, that felt like a second Friday, effervescing with anticipation for good times to come, that many commandeered for good times in the present. Right after it was all over, on Wednesday, Mr. Smith urgently deposited cash at the...

UNITED STATES—Well, I had an English student named Berta in a class I was substituting. She had a motto that she got from her grandfather: Live and learn. Well Berta was talking about how she already had her five minutes of fame. Somebody with a camera had followed her around for a month in her job and life and made...

UNITED STATES—The cafe next to the laundromat celebrated the first year of new ownership last month on Fountain Avenue, triggering a festival of remembrance. I heartily took part, since I am reputed to be a person who goes back to the beginning, before the beginning. I have been there for a lot of it. Often when asked for my business...

UNITED STATES—Raising a child between two addresses, located halfway across town, is no bed of roses. Jared Hill knows. He takes his son Kyle to school bright and early on Monday for that stinking 7 a.m. AP class. What! Are the people running the school sick? This self-evident reaction is concealed for Kyle’s sake: rebelling against school policy would...

UNITED STATES—February 10, 1992, I said goodbye to Los Angeles. “The Strawberry Butterfly,” the screenplay that had grown from the chrysalis of “The Persecuted,” had not sold, but I had faith in it and Everett Lewis’ belief in it. Three years had come full circle. It was surely time for me to move on, and just as surely, when...