he shifted to the third person
someone outside his skin
someone easier to understand
someone easier to forgive
somewhere easier to hide
he felt under interrogation
for years answers formed easily
short sentences small words
now the simple questions
were grey nuanced and difficult
set with slow traps and baited
with articulate parenthesis
now he was no longer first
now he had someone to blame
(February 5, 2026)
I believe I was 34. I had three children under the age of 3. I had taught 150+ 13-14 year old students each year for the last five years. It was my first time to be on a jury. The defense attorneys should not have let me on the jury. If they were doing their job of defending him, they should not have let several of us on the jury: the older church going Christian grandmother; the trainer for the local University’s swim team (18-22 year old young women). Looking back, I figure his lawyers thought we would be sympathetic to the youth minister because we understood the dreams and desires of adolescent young girls. We understood how they trusted us, and even loved us. We understood the accusations which could be thrown because of childish misunderstandings. Fortunately we did understand, and came to the verdict that the youth minister of the Baptist church near Dallas had broken the promise of in loco parentis, the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. That part of that promise that was to not mentally and sexually abuse a thirteen year old girl.
It was a civil trial. Both the former youth minister and the Church were being sued. The statute of limitations for a criminal trial had expired. The young woman was now 21 years old. The prosecutors told us that the evidence for a civil trial was not the same as a criminal trial. It was not beyond a reasonable doubt, but that the preponderance of evidence that lead to a guilty verdict. The preponderance of evidence dropped on us in thick slabs of revulsion for eight hours each of the days the trial lasted. We were asked to determine what percentage of responsibility for the sexual abuse of the young woman lay with the church, or the youth minister.
The trial, they said, would last about 4 days. In the end it went on for two weeks. We heard testimony from the ministers of the church, the deacons, the church women volunteers, the other young members of the church; all those who also went on church trips, attended youth activities organized by the youth ministry, went to pool parties sponsored by the church where the children played games in the pool with the youth minister; who remembered how he and she sat on the edge of the group around the fire at the beach while others sang songs of joy. We heard from the therapist she went to for years after the youth minister’s rape of the young woman. We heard from the young woman. We were given access to her detailed adolescent diary. The same questions were asked of each witness. The answers that were given were so monotonously repetitive that by the end of the second week, I could have answered for each of the witnesses who were called.
We did not hear from the former youth minister. He was a minister of a church in Ohio at this point. He could not be forced to attend a civil trial in Texas. He had moved on from his days as a mere Christian minister to the young souls in his charge in suburban Dallas. God had called him to a new ministry. He was the head of his own church, a respected man. He could not even be impelled to make any monetary restitution that we decided to lay upon him. He was free, forgiven by society, if not by God.
The deliberations in the small room in which we sat were not about whether the events happened; it was beyond debate that the youth minister did what he was accused of doing, but instead circled around how much the church should have known, or did know about the abuse. We were charged with what percentage of guilt lay with each of the defendants, and how much the total monetary fine should be for the actions of the youth minister, who ultimately would not have to pay anything for what he had done to the young woman. What was the price of rape? How much should an institution be held accountable for the actions of an individual member of an organization? Ultimately, we came to a consensus that he was responsible for 80% of the verdict. It was strange sitting in the room, listening to other men arguing for smaller responsibilities to be laid upon the church (because they knew the minister would pay nothing), for a lesser amount of money to be charged to the church, who should have known, who in much of the testimony showed that they did know, about the actions of the youth minister. Too many of the men on the jury seemed to me to be searching for a way to make it all just go away; after all, she let it happen. She let it happen. She was thirteen. He was mid-twenties.
The second decision we were charged to make was the monetary amount that was to be rewarded to the young woman. Here attorneys were asking for 20 million dollars. The foreman of our jury thought that was an absurd amount of money, finally reluctantly acquiescing to 10 million dollars, eight of which the former youth minister would never pay. The other two million being the responsibility of the church.
I remember walking to the bus which would take me to where my car was parked so that I could drive home back to my family with our small children, and then back to my classroom the next day with my wildly wonderful thirteen year old students, thinking that we had all failed her somehow. That justice was bought off cheaply. That we were all responsible for what happened to her. The trial sat in my mind darkly for the rest of the thirty years I worked in education.
This is how this story goes, or at least what I can remember from how Dad told it. I have probably told this story as many, if not more, times than my dad. Uncle Les had gone off to college in the late 1800’s. Every now and then a letter from him would arrive that first semester, and then they didn’t. My Grandfather Noel, Les’ brother, saddled up his horse and rode off to check on things. When he arrived, Les’ dorm room appeared as if Les had just walked out and would return any minute. He had been missing for several months. Then years later, around 1906, when my dad was three years old, a man came riding up to the “dirt” farm Noel struggled to eek a living from out near Liberty Hill. The man had two large saddle bags draped over his horse, two bandoliers criss-crossing his chest, and two large pistols hanging from his hips. The man was Uncle Les. After he dismounted, he walked into the house and hung his pistols from a peg on the wall. Les never touched those guns again. “Leave those guns alone, Ralph They’re nothing but trouble,” my Grandmother Pearl told the excited three year old. Les took his saddle bags out to the barn where he slept for the next 7 years as he worked for his brother on the farm for room and board. After seven years, Les took the almost forgotten saddle bags and bought a ranch out west. Even as children, we saw the holes in Dad’s story: Where did Les get the money for his ranch? Noel only paid him with food and a place to sleep. Where had Les been all those years after disappearing from his college? What had he been doing? After being gone for so long, why did he wait for seven years before he bought his ranch? What was in those two saddle bags? Was any of what Dad said over the years about Les true in any way? How much have I filled in the holes of my memory with conjecture?
(September 7, 2025)
Nothing is complicated.
Everything is simple,
if not simplistic.
Caught in worry, we
trouble our troubles
which are nothing really.
I read a poem today
on the internet: the poet,
obviously under the influence
of Bukowski, judges the bartender
for her intertwined tattoos
and for her storied fucking.
He ignores that what we write
often says more of the writer
than the subject of the poem.
We are the pen and the paper.
While in the slow dusk of life,
we see only with myopic eyes.
I’ve winnowed enough truth
from any number of lies to know
there is little difference, and
I’m not sure I trust anyone
anymore, especially myself
when it finally comes to that.
(June 30, 2025)
it was just the two of us Lisa and I
too young for children we thought
now they’re all grown and gone
and I’m too tired even for regret
(May 26, 2025)
He sits in a darkened room, oblivious
to the metaphor of time: today
is today he says to himself.
The door shuts; he cannot leave,
any more than live out of context,
a moment without past or future.
A rose buds, blooms, petals fall—
without narrative, without sequence.
(May 14, 2025)
Some days just walking—
and I lean from the earth’s core
like a falling star.
I stand up quickly,
birds, planets, and stars swarm like flies;
I fall to my knees.
Nothing is stable,
yet, I expect the sunrise
as I kneel in prayer.
One hand touches a wall,
the other reaches into air
for something not there.
The earth spins about the sun,
as my fingers lose their grip.
(May 3, 2025)
The rabbit nibbles
fresh clover through the spring day.
The dog’s ears prick up.
(April 9, 2025)
I wake. The puppy needs to go outside.
The older dog comes along as well
hoping to roust a nervous rabbit.
It’s close enough to six by this time
to feed them, and take my daily meds.
I am tired, and worried about the world.
They finish their ration of kibble
and head happily back up the stairs.
I turn off the light, and follow along.
In the hazy half-minute it takes
for me to crawl under the sheets,
they’ve both tightly curled in bed.
I lay there unable to return to sleep,
and listen to the dogs’ soft snores.
(April 4, 2025)
Over the last week I re-read Roger Zelazny’s The First Chronicles of Amber: (Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, and The Courts of Chaos). I first read this series in the mid to late 1970’s. I was in my mid-teens, when I pretty much only read Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels. I think the Amber series was probably my first real exposure to multiple reality, and the idea that we control and can change the reality we are born into. This time through I noticed ideas of ontological basis to reality versus epistemological understandings. Here is a bit from near the end: “Yes. You see, we are hatched and we drift on the surface of events. Sometimes, we feel that we actually influence things, and this gives rise to striving. This is a big mistake, because it creates desires and builds up a false ego when just being should be enough. That leads to more desires and more striving and there you are, trapped.” I don’t really remember any of this when I read it the first time 50 years ago. I am sure I absorbed it somehow, just not consciously. For the most part, I enjoyed it well enough this last week; I mean I obviously finished it again. On the whole it is still a fun fantasy novel filled with sword fights and family intrigue and back stabbing, accompanied by quick insertions of Platonism without being too pedantic about it all. There are another five books in the series; I will not seek them out.
always the desire
to be ten years ago
when life was easier
as now ten years hence
(March 29, 2025)
by
I’ve lost my glasses.
Fog hangs thick; it’s hard to see
beyond the back fence.
The new moon lurks above me,
almost as dark as the sky.
(January 19, 2025)
subtext 