The 1920′s are characterized as a decade of prosperity. Though initially economic in nature, this prosperity diffused into all other arenas of American life. It was the age of the flapper, of speakeasies, and of trivial spending. It was an era that threatened the image of the Victorian woman – – timid, conservative and polite [...]
I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers. When I woke up, the cigarette was starting to burn my fingers. A thin man in a gray flannel shirt was [...]
1857 lithograph by Armand Gautier, showing personifications of dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotic mania and paralysis in the gardens of the Hospice de la Salpêtrière. In an attempt to catalog madness, the artist has created a zoo exhibit for lunacy. They are curious objects, these women who have lost their mind with [...]
In a Dark Time In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood– A lord of nature weeping to a tree, I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s [...]
How can I possibly articulate the flame inside me? Can it ever relate to the world outside? And if so, is it that I cannot help but take a step, yet will never make a correct one? excerpted from the drmstream Facebook page I could have asked this question once. My voice would have cracked, [...]
Each place you go, don’t look for the thing that is different. Look for the thing that is the same. That is your starting point, the anchor. I can share the experience. We aren’t alone. But we can’t find each other inside all the noise. We have to look out into the quiet, strip the [...]
Her name was Arline. She was my father’s mother. She died in 1949 when my father was 16. We knew very little about her growing up. In the early 1980′s, after my grandfather died, a letter arrived at the house from my father’s aunt Marie who was six years younger than her sister. My parents [...]
An old tree came down at the edge of the property in a windstorm. It sat below the cottage at the edge of the farm road. The base was massive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, making it appear foreshortened against the sky. The trunks and branches [...]
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. Jonathan Swift This sketch is easy to pass over. It doesn’t conform to our standards of baby memorabilia…of photographs in a little brag book or on our digital phone, moments of “look here,” “isn’t that cute,” “ooh” and “ahh.” The sketch is an afterthought, [...]
By the beginning of the 20th Century, Brooklyn’s die was cast. A thriving sub-metropolis, annexed to one of the greatest cities in the world, its nexus gravitating inexorably to the three grand bridges that connect it to Manhattan. Brooklyn was a staging point. Ships carried goods into its protected harbors. Produce came in each day [...]