Jacob Lawrence, "Children Playing," 1961
Jacob Lawrence, Children Playing. (1961)
Can a Game Be Literature?

Mark's Pages

August 19, 2003:

Her strange Puritanism.

Summer. Bright sun, dry heat, the moist smell of newly-watered grass. Complex of two-story apartment buildings blocks wide, a half-mile long, sleepy in the heat alongside the edge of a wide canyon.

Across the street young Katy laughs and squeals. Her little brother has snatched her towel, running with it down the sidewalk toward the pool. Katy, all curves and hourglass in her pink two-piece bikini, stands surrounded by neighborhood boys, laughing and squealing. Even in Junior High we know a sex goddess when we see one.

Eyes glued, it's obvious where your attention lies. Your mother makes her strange pinched-lips face of disapproval. Summing up the situation she remarks, "She's so... well-shaped."

At her friend's house one afternoon the radio played "Let's Spend the Night Together." "Isn't that a beautiful song?", her friend said, embracing in her Latin soul the gusto of the moment.

In response her face fell, her lips pursed, she appeared either disoriented or angry, or both, or something. "No," is all she said.