Few things come back to me with this much clarity.

I am ten. I walk by the shore just outside Kōzu with my two brothers, twins, and five years older than me. It is a cold December day, a blustery wind harassing the waves, pushing them up against the shore in riotous piles. Across the bay to the north Mount Fuji rises up, twenty miles away, perhaps thirty – I am too young to know distances. Its white cap is barely distinguishable from the heavy clouds, only a certain solidity marking where its sweeping sides begin and the grey mist ends.

My desire for there to be an afterlife

equals my conviction there isn’t one,

sing as one may, alone or in unison,

“When we all get to heaven.”

A heaven less screwed up than earth

where we long, and love and hurt.

An eternal present from which we look

down at the past; everyone has one

and everyone’s isn’t exactly alike.

January 1940

Northeastern Finland

The Winter War -- Finland versus the Soviet Union

The tundra clearing rang with the sound of bullets. It was almost dusk now, on the third day of fighting, and snow was still falling. It covered the ground in layers and sprayed upwards in a cloud of white whenever a stray bullet punctured the dirt underneath. The riflemen had begun taking shifts to shovel the snow out of the trenches, and, like the battle itself, it was never-ending labor. Every shovelful that was flung out and upwards by frosty fingertips was soon replaced with fresh precipitation.

Dear Kafka,

It’s a great pity knowing that you died thinking you were a failure. You were my very first love. Now

don’t scoff at me from the other world. Your dreams are now my dreams or I wish to make them mine. I

desperately want to know what you felt when you wrote ‘Letters to Melina’. Was it joy? Was it despair?

Was it jealousy? Or was it the feeling of an unrequited love? You really do live up to your name. Don’t

you? You are a crow who likes to get lost in the shimmery sadness and in the dreams of others. For once

The day he died—February 3, 1959—was “The Day the Music Died,” or so claimed Don McLean in his eponymous hit record. But The Big Bopper, born

Jiles

Perry

Richardson

Jr.

did not lead a life that was the stuff of feature films, unlike the legends of the other passengers on that star-marked airplane: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens.