Larry Berger Archive

Homer showed up at the back door again on Saturday. I swung the door wide and let him in. I know it’s safe because he and his wife never go out and I’m the original hermit, so there is little chance that we’ve had contact with the virus. He sat at the kitchen table. “I’m […]

TWO PEOPLE I saw two people today, standing almost together and then, there was the sound and everyone looked up and spread out; I could see it in her eyes, she just wanted to be closer; I was a coward, I couldn’t do it. We stand looking at each other from so far away now; […]

I heard a knock at the back door. When I went to answer it, I found my neighbor, Homer, with a bruise on his forehead, and it looked like he had been crying. “What happened to you?” I asked. “I don’t want to tell you,” he replied. “Can I come in?” With no need for […]

It seems to me that energy is created by movement and friction. When I rub my hands together, they get warm. But where does the energy come from to rub my hands together? I think it’s the air going in and out of my mouth, through the tubes, into the big sacks; in all this […]

I remember a trip my wife, Sue and I took quite a few summers ago, back when we were both young and footloose and fancy-free. We had traveled to Chicago to visit my grandmother and then decided to head out to Seattle to see one of my wife’s cousins. The trip to Chicago had been […]

Stretching all the away around the world just below the Arctic Circle there is a large boreal forest. It’s been called the Amazon of the North, and the earth’s green crown. It is the largest intact old-growth forest on the planet. Canada alone contains one billion acres from Newfoundland to the Yukon Territory. Three billion […]

There is no such thing as peanut butter. I’ve searched the whole pantry. It’s a myth. I think they have implanted a chip into my brain that makes me long for a substance I cannot obtain. I am awaiting a knock on the door, some special agent who will try to convince me that he […]

My flower, If you were a nasturtium, there would be no problem. I would look at your leaves or your buds and if they were not blooming as they should or a little misshapen or not full color, I would determine that something was wrong. I’d take a sample of the soil you were growing […]

I have just returned from a place where the process of eating was the sampling of one another’s personalities. And working was a rearrangement of each other’s possessions. Now whether these possessions were actual or imagined was not perfectly clear, or whether subsequent rearrangement was necessary after each affair, not clear either. In one instance […]

File this one under “daring escape attempts.” A man in Chicago quite a few years ago was driving a taxi and his fare put a finger to the back of the driver’s head and demanded his money. The cabbie had no idea it was only the man’s finger and in desperation decided he was going […]