From the story, When Murray Met Helen
The first time Murray confronted death was in ’42, at Guadalcanal, Continue reading Unconscious
Category Archives: WWoB
Shoeless
From the story, When Murray Met Helen
June came.
The Russian stock market was tumbling. A new island was being born in the North Atlantic. A fourteen year old boy escaped from Myanmar in the wheel well of a jetliner. Back in Milwaukee, Helen considered the e-mailed entreaties from one of her periodic suiters, who now seemed to think that the path back to her favors should resemble something like a clemency hearing. Murray sat shoeless in his blue silk bathrobe and composed his next letter to Senator Feingold, this one about the importance of the Great Lakes fisheries.
Dandelions
From the story, When Murray met Helen
Murray was a night owl. Still undecided between Leno and Letterman, and still feeling deeply abandoned by Johnny and Ed, he stayed up late, flipping the channels back and forth to see if something, anything, would make him laugh.
Experience
From the story, When Murray Met Helen
Monday had been muggy. Tuesday had been wet. But Wednesday a front had come through in the morning and left in its wake a clean window of blue sky, with mares tail clouds reaching beyond Wisconsin, out toward Michigan’s upper peninsula. It can be cold in Miller Field’s right field seats, as they catch the shade earlier, and so Murray wore a leather bomber jacket, an ancient Milwaukee Braves emblem on the back, a still working zipper on the front, and a wool cap rolled up like a beret in the shoulder strap.
Helen wore her Gorman Thomas souvenir jersey. She’d put her hair in a ponytail so that it extruded through the hole in the back of her ball cap, and she wore Jackie O style sunglasses.