Larry Berger Archive

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 […]

There is more than one way to see a shooting star. I like to lie out at night on the hood of my car where I can see a wide patch of sky. I look for satellites. There are so many of them that if you keep watching the sky, eventually you will see one […]

I wake up every morning sometime between two and five o’clock am. And often I can fall back asleep again but usually I can’t. When I can’t I have a little regimen that I follow. I take ten milligrams of melatonin (a hormone usually created in the pineal gland, but available in pill form, that […]

Years ago, when the children were growing up, there was a simple birdhouse hanging on an old oak tree outside my bedroom window amid small banana trees and a profusion of ferns. It was a wooden structure made of raw plywood with a sloping roof, a small hole in the front, no frills. But no […]

If I had a dog I would name him King Arfer and make him wear a crown; I would call his yard the dogdom; I would declare all the stray cats in our neighborhood his vassals, and bring one home now and then for King Arfer to dominate; but I don’t have a dog because […]