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Past Issues
Issue #25
Issue #24
The Grace Hotel
Thailand, 1976They served Western breakfasts and Heinekens on the 3½-hour flight from Kathmandu to Bangkok. It was all you could drink, and my friend Dave and I helped ourselves as we flew south of the Himalayas, searched for Everest tucked somewhere in the jagged skyline near the Nepal-China border, crossed Bangladesh and the sprawling delta, cast our shadow on the unbroken forests of green Myanmar, skirted the edge of the Andaman Sea, and finally began our descent into Thailand. Farther east were Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam, destroyed by the war that we had feared would never end. It was October 1976. Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh city—had fallen to the North Vietnamese Army a year and a half before. There were reports of boat people trying to escape, rapes and murders by pirates on the open sea, massive reeducation camps, and torture and genocide by the Khmer Rouge next door in the newly named Kampuchea.
Issue #23
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Late October
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
–Robert Frost
Issue #22
Cell Block
Clear and Present
Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)
Issue #21
Contrary to Life
Fool’s Gold
Years ago, I took my daughter Maggie to India. She was 14 at the time, and we found ourselves early one morning wrapped in blankets and drinking chai on the balcony of a small hillside hotel overlooking a wide bend in the upper reaches of the Ganges. We were near the village of Lakshman Jhula, just north of Rishikesh in the mountain state of Uttarakhand. The valley below us was thick with rising fog, but as the clouds slowly lifted we saw white-clad figures making their way down to the rocks and sand on a wide point bar at the river’s edge.
Charc Bites
“How ‘bout them hors d’oeuvres ain’t they sweet? Little piece of cheese, little piece of meat!” –Mason Williams
Issue #20
Letter to a College President
The Mary Washington Way
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
Issue #19
Widowhood
A Confession
All that banging was happening inside my dream; yet it kept going. Insistent. Urgent.
I rolled over and squinted at the clock. 2:20 a.m. Someone was pounding on the front door. Ahhh, my husband forgot his key. He’s home, finally, from the college basketball game he’d flown down to Wake Forest to see. In darkness, I lurched down the hallway to let him in.
On my porch stood a young Fredericksburg cop. His cruiser was in the driveway, blue lights swirling in the night. I tugged my T-shirt down as far as it would go over my bare legs and wondered if I was in some kind of trouble.
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
Issue #18
Burying Teeny Tiny
A Better Place
My first scientific experiment was to find out if heaven existed. Of course it wasn’t real science. I didn’t know anything about the experimental method, but I knew there was something I had to find out. By the time I was 6, I had heard a lot about heaven from my devoutly religious father and from preachers who conducted funerals. You have to understand that when I was growing up in the farming community of Smithfield, Virginia, back in the 1940s, funerals and weddings were the two biggest social events, and my family didn’t miss a one. Funerals and weddings were like family reunions with people you hadn’t seen since the last event and one person you’d never see again.
No Moss?
For Hospital Corporation, Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’ Comes to an End After 20 Years
Issue #17
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
Meet the Neighbors
The Right-Wing Spammers and Scriveners show up for work in the mornings just like anybody else, pulling off Washington Street in the tiny village of Falmouth, Virginia, squeezing through a narrow opening in a chain link fence, and parking in a gravel lot under a row of ivy-strangled oaks, three of them dying, one already dead. They drive a Toyota Prius with a turtle sticker on the back. Or a black SUV, or an older-model Camry, or any of a dozen other middle-class sedans. Nothing flashy, though one of their bosses, a bearded, balding, political marketer and Shriner potentate named Andrew Coelho keeps a Heritage Shrine Club trailer back there for ferrying around his lodge’s clown cars.
Issue #16
Dishonorable Mentions
The Gaujot Brothers of West Virginia
They must have been hard up for heroes back in the day. How else to explain the Medals of Honor—America’s highest award for valor in combat–given 15 months apart in 1911 and 1912 to the Gaujot brothers of West Virginia, one of whom had once shot and killed an apparently unarmed fellow soldier and got away with it in military court, the other of whom had been court martialed for water-torturing Filipino prisoners and had to pay a whopping $150 fine?
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
Issue #15
Deliverance
Story Time in Heck
I’d rather have been Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, one of my favorite Old Testament stories, plus I always liked saying their names, but since there was only just the one of me I settled for thinking of myself as a modern-day Daniel in the lions’ den as I strode in a light rain past the free hot chocolate tables and the not-so-free donut trucks and into Riverbend High School in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The lobby had been converted for the day—the first Saturday in December—into what looked like the tail end of a yard sale when all that’s left are a bunch of crappy books laid out on folding tables, plus a couple of bowls filled with rubber balls and pencils.
Issue #14
A Memory of Light
Salt to the Sea
[Editor’s note: Ceili Leahy was 17 in the fall of 2014 when she started at the University of Virginia, three months after completing chemotherapy for metastatic Ewings sarcoma. She took a course in American Environmental Literature that first semester, and in November 2014 was assigned to write an essay in the style of one of the authors. Ceili—an Irish name, pronounced Kay-Lee–chose Annie Dillard because she so loved Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “By using [Annie Dillard’s] technique of posing rhetorical questions and incorporating language that is more colloquial than literary, I created a similar voice,” Ceili wrote in a note accompanying the assignment. “My exploration of the human memory builds off Dillard’s treatment of consciousness and self-consciousness and their pertinence to the ‘great door to the present.’” On January 27, 2016, a year and a half after writing this essay, Ceili, then 19, died from acute myeloid leukemia at Children’s National Hospital. She had stopped treatment a few months earlier so that she could “live vividly” through her last days.]
At Long Last Love
A man doesn’t wait for you to take care of your dying ex-husband if he doesn’t love you.
Issue #13
Déjà vu All Over Again
A Year in the Life of Pie & Chai
If the stories in this month’s Pie & Chai look familiar, that’s because we thought we’d mark our one-year anniversary by re-running the articles and essays from the inaugural issue we published back in November 2022. A year later, they still represent the kind of storytelling—personal, eclectic, we hope timeless—that we started Pie & Chai to share.
A Modest Proposal
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations (With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Issue #12
Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here.
From Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here.
Halloween is, indisputably and factually, the best holiday. Glowing houses on a crisp fall evening, kids in costumes running down the block, and of course, pumpkins. Pumpkin carving is the perfect recreational craft. It’s quicker than carving marble, you’re not stuck with them for more than a few days or weeks, and you’re only expected to make the effort once a year.
Issue #11
Off Our Rockers
From Lies, Race, and Redemption: A Memoir
As a white Southern woman born in 1937, I grew up in a segregated society of “White only” and “Colored only” signs, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate waiting rooms and schools and churches, separate entrances to the town of Smithfield, Virginia’s one movie theater. “Separate but equal” was the mantra, but it was a lie. You had to be blind, insensitive, and in total denial to believe it. Since I was the privileged color, racism hadn’t threatened my life and stripped me of my humanity, but it had sickened my soul.
Issue #10
Critterworld
A Story
First the rumors.
No, Henry’s Meats didn’t come around with their knives to carve steaks from the body. Mutt & Jeff’s Grill didn’t serve elephant-burgers.
Nobody sawed off the feet for umbrella stands. Nobody caught any weird African diseases, no elephantiasis. The little girl from Michigan, the one who got trapped in the car, she might have seen a psychiatrist for a while, but if she did it was back up North, so I don’t see how anybody could have known for sure about that story, true or not.
Top 10 Reasons Why Home is Better than the Pound
As dictated by J.D. (aka Jus’a Dawg) Evans
Issue #9
Bullet in the Brain
Our Hubris. Our Arrogance. Our Delusions. Our Guns.
The only time I ever shot a gun I killed a turtle. We were visiting a family, the Collinses, who used to be our backyard neighbors, but they had moved somewhere else. It looked like a farm only there weren’t any crops or animals. There was a barn and a pond. The grownups went inside to do whatever grownups did back then. Us kids stayed outside. The Collins kids had a .22 rifle and were showing us what great marksmen they were, blasting away at cans and things. My brother and I weren’t allowed to have guns, though we were allowed to pretend we had guns—with sticks—unless it was a Sunday, when even playing with sticks was forbidden. I remember getting a pirate pistol as a present one time, but that was when I had my tonsils taken out, so I don’t think it counted.
Kiss “A as in Apple” Goodbye
The All New & Completely Updated Guide to Code Words for the International Spelling Alphabet
Issue #8
It Could Have Happened Here
G.O.D. and Country
Brent David Alford was watching hockey the night of June 18, 2022. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals, Colorado Avalanche vs. Tampa Bay Lightning. The Avs were in the process of smoking the Lightning, 7-0, and would go on to win the Cup 4-2. At 9:45 p.m., late in the second period or early in the third, Alford’s wife Anjelica noticed a car had pulled into their long private drive in rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and was idling about 30 yards from the house at a dirt turnaround. Alford grabbed his handgun, a Glock 9mm with a 15-round magazine, and went out to confront the driver and whoever else was in the car. Anjelica and a teenage son, their youngest, stayed at the front door. Anjelica would later tell an investigator that there was so much marijuana smoke filling the car that the occupants’ heads bobbed above it as if they were floating on a cloud–an image she insisted she saw despite the distance from the house, the darkness, the floodlight she said was reflecting off the car windows, and the law of thermodynamics.
Issue #7
A Land of the Living
ONE/The Aravalli Hills
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,
and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
–Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Issue #6
Not Healthy. Not Caring. Not Even a System.
Broken Bad
A few months after he graduated from college, a friend crashed his bike one evening as he raced down a trail near Charlottesville. He suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury, but as those injuries go, he was fairly lucky: He retained full use of his upper body and partial use of his legs, and despite fears that he’d never ride again, he went on to become an Olympic para-cyclist. He was also fortunate in another way: Before his accident, his dad had bought him a short-term health insurance policy.
Issue #5
A Witness
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
I recently finished work on a historical novel for Scholastic Press titled Stolen by Night which is scheduled for publication in fall 2023. It’s the story of teenagers in the Resistance in Occupied Paris during World War II, many of whom, after their capture, were “disappeared” in Hitler’s “Night and Fog” program, Nacht und Nebel. Most of the NN prisoners were sent to Konzentrationslager Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi-run concentration camp on what is now French soil, in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace-Lorraine. Tens of thousands died there. Few survived.
Issue #4
Line of Departure
A Dog’s Life
[Editor’s note: In the photograph above are Marine Captain-Ret. Jason Haag and his service dog, Axel, constant companions for most of the past 11 years following Jason’s final, troubled return from multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Axel died on January 14, and this picture of Jason and Axel, by photographer Dave Ellis, was taken moments before he passed. Below is writer Kristin Davis’s obituary for Axel, posted on the website for Leashes of Valor, a nonprofit founded by Jason that advocates for, and trains, service dogs for other struggling veterans. Also posted below, after the obituary, are links to “Line of Departure,” a three-part series from 2013 published in the Fredericksburg, VA Free Lance-Star about the Haag family, and Axel, and Jason’s struggles with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. The Pie & Chai editors send love to the Haags, our former neighbors, as they grieve a dog who changed their lives in so many ways. With Axel’s help, the Haags’ courageous efforts to seek peace in their own family created a path to healing for so many others. To learn more about Axel, and about Jason’s ongoing work on behalf of America’s combat veterans, go to Leashes of Valor.org.]
Hearts and Minds
“The sorrow that has no vent in tears may make other organs weep”
Papa Don’t Preach
Put Away That Cell Phone or Ernest Hemingway Will Punch You in the Face
Issue #3
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
The Humans of Brooke Road aren’t all beaver killers. Some are actually quite nice. One family rescues mini pigs. Another runs a conservation research center. Many may not even know they had a hand in the torture-deaths of nearly three dozen beavers two years ago—parents, yearlings, and kits—and the destruction in all or in part of 15 beaver dams tucked into the reeds and hyacinths and groves of dead ash trees in the forested wetlands of Accokeek Creek.
How to Hospital
There’s No Point in Depriving Yourself When Things Already Suck
Issue #2
The Umgebung
Sort of a Christmas Story
No one at the Christmas party seemed particularly interested when Bird brought up Jakob von Uexküll’s insight into the mind of the tick. The tick? people said to Bird, eyebrows raised, shoulders turning ever so slightly towards an exit. Are we talking ticks? I wouldn’t think a tick had much of a mind. Exactly! Bird said. As von Uexküll pointed out, the tick’s simple sensory apparatus recognizes only three aspects of the physical world: a sensitivity to sunlight which leads it to the top of a blade of grass; the smell of butyric acid from the sebaceous follicles of mammals, which tells it when to let go and fall; and the heat of blood which guides it through the hair to its dinner. In von Uexküll’s theory that’s the tick’s umwelt—it’s self-world—the specific way in which it is embedded in the umgebung, the otherwise unknowable reality which surrounds us all. Though surrounding isn’t quite accurate…
Issue #1
A Modest Proposal
(With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations
Why Pie & Chai
Expanding Minds, Forging Connections, Sweetening Lives
We’re launching Pie & Chai Magazine for a simple reason: to provide good writers with a place to tell good stories, the kind worth sharing. In these stories—under the broad categories of Deep Dives, Being Human, Prescriptions, LOL, Etcetera, and 22401(ish)—we hope to move, enlighten, and amuse you, and draw you in to a creative community.
We aren’t here to make money. We won’t sell subscriptions, we won’t run ads, we won’t pirate your data, and our contributors won’t get paid. Everything here will exist because someone cared enough to create it. For free.
All Categories
Deep Dives
Contrary to Life
Fool’s Gold
Years ago, I took my daughter Maggie to India. She was 14 at the time, and we found ourselves early one morning wrapped in blankets and drinking chai on the balcony of a small hillside hotel overlooking a wide bend in the upper reaches of the Ganges. We were near the village of Lakshman Jhula, just north of Rishikesh in the mountain state of Uttarakhand. The valley below us was thick with rising fog, but as the clouds slowly lifted we saw white-clad figures making their way down to the rocks and sand on a wide point bar at the river’s edge.
Letter to a College President
The Mary Washington Way
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
No Moss?
For Hospital Corporation, Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’ Comes to an End After 20 Years
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
Meet the Neighbors
The Right-Wing Spammers and Scriveners show up for work in the mornings just like anybody else, pulling off Washington Street in the tiny village of Falmouth, Virginia, squeezing through a narrow opening in a chain link fence, and parking in a gravel lot under a row of ivy-strangled oaks, three of them dying, one already dead. They drive a Toyota Prius with a turtle sticker on the back. Or a black SUV, or an older-model Camry, or any of a dozen other middle-class sedans. Nothing flashy, though one of their bosses, a bearded, balding, political marketer and Shriner potentate named Andrew Coelho keeps a Heritage Shrine Club trailer back there for ferrying around his lodge’s clown cars.
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
Dishonorable Mentions
The Gaujot Brothers of West Virginia
They must have been hard up for heroes back in the day. How else to explain the Medals of Honor—America’s highest award for valor in combat–given 15 months apart in 1911 and 1912 to the Gaujot brothers of West Virginia, one of whom had once shot and killed an apparently unarmed fellow soldier and got away with it in military court, the other of whom had been court martialed for water-torturing Filipino prisoners and had to pay a whopping $150 fine?
Being Human
The Grace Hotel
Thailand, 1976They served Western breakfasts and Heinekens on the 3½-hour flight from Kathmandu to Bangkok. It was all you could drink, and my friend Dave and I helped ourselves as we flew south of the Himalayas, searched for Everest tucked somewhere in the jagged skyline near the Nepal-China border, crossed Bangladesh and the sprawling delta, cast our shadow on the unbroken forests of green Myanmar, skirted the edge of the Andaman Sea, and finally began our descent into Thailand. Farther east were Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam, destroyed by the war that we had feared would never end. It was October 1976. Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh city—had fallen to the North Vietnamese Army a year and a half before. There were reports of boat people trying to escape, rapes and murders by pirates on the open sea, massive reeducation camps, and torture and genocide by the Khmer Rouge next door in the newly named Kampuchea.
Prescriptions
Cell Block
Clear and Present
Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)
Letter to a College President
The Mary Washington Way
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
Not Healthy. Not Caring. Not Even a System.
Broken Bad
A few months after he graduated from college, a friend crashed his bike one evening as he raced down a trail near Charlottesville. He suffered a life-altering spinal cord injury, but as those injuries go, he was fairly lucky: He retained full use of his upper body and partial use of his legs, and despite fears that he’d never ride again, he went on to become an Olympic para-cyclist. He was also fortunate in another way: Before his accident, his dad had bought him a short-term health insurance policy.
Papa Don’t Preach
Put Away That Cell Phone or Ernest Hemingway Will Punch You in the Face
How to Hospital
There’s No Point in Depriving Yourself When Things Already Suck
LOL
A Modest Proposal
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations (With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Top 10 Reasons Why Home is Better than the Pound
As dictated by J.D. (aka Jus’a Dawg) Evans
Kiss “A as in Apple” Goodbye
The All New & Completely Updated Guide to Code Words for the International Spelling Alphabet
A Modest Proposal
(With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations
22401-ish
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Late October
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
–Robert Frost
Cell Block
Clear and Present
Shortly into my first year teaching English and International Baccalaureate Lang & Lit at Mountain View High School in Stafford County, Virginia—the first day, actually—I knew I was going to have to do something about the cellphones. If a school shooter had blasted his way through the door to our classroom, the kids might have videoed first, posted on social media second, and only then looked around for somewhere to hide. And that’s IF they’d been able to pull their faces away from whatever was streaming on their iPhone screens to even notice. Not that I allowed them to be on their phones. They were just that good at sneaking them out, and that uncaring about my disapprobation and orders for them to put the damn things away already so we could get back to discussing the implications of the curious elliptical passage at the end of chapter two in The Great Gatsby. (A drunk Nick Carraway, the narrator, is standing in the bedroom of the photographer Mr. McKee, who is sitting on the bed in his underwear.)
Charc Bites
“How ‘bout them hors d’oeuvres ain’t they sweet? Little piece of cheese, little piece of meat!” –Mason Williams
Contrary to Life
Fool’s Gold
Years ago, I took my daughter Maggie to India. She was 14 at the time, and we found ourselves early one morning wrapped in blankets and drinking chai on the balcony of a small hillside hotel overlooking a wide bend in the upper reaches of the Ganges. We were near the village of Lakshman Jhula, just north of Rishikesh in the mountain state of Uttarakhand. The valley below us was thick with rising fog, but as the clouds slowly lifted we saw white-clad figures making their way down to the rocks and sand on a wide point bar at the river’s edge.
Letter to a College President
The Mary Washington Way
When University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino found out students had once again erected tents in Jefferson Square to protest the war in Gaza, he decided to make his way to the grassy square rather than call in Virginia State Police. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon, April 27, and a dozen 20-somethings were sitting inside the tents, eating snacks and studying for exams. Campus police were already there monitoring the situation as they had been since the sit-in started the day before. The students weren’t being disruptive or violent in any way, Paino said later. “By all accounts, they were peaceful and not engaging in any form of antisemitic rhetoric.”
NO MOSS?
For Hospital Corporation,
Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’
Comes to an End After 20 Years
(They’re Keeping the Building, Too)
No Moss?
For Hospital Corporation, Free Clinic Support ‘In Perpetuity’ Comes to an End After 20 Years
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
Meet the Neighbors
The Right-Wing Spammers and Scriveners show up for work in the mornings just like anybody else, pulling off Washington Street in the tiny village of Falmouth, Virginia, squeezing through a narrow opening in a chain link fence, and parking in a gravel lot under a row of ivy-strangled oaks, three of them dying, one already dead. They drive a Toyota Prius with a turtle sticker on the back. Or a black SUV, or an older-model Camry, or any of a dozen other middle-class sedans. Nothing flashy, though one of their bosses, a bearded, balding, political marketer and Shriner potentate named Andrew Coelho keeps a Heritage Shrine Club trailer back there for ferrying around his lodge’s clown cars.
The Beavers of Accokeek Creek
We Like Nature OK, We Just Don’t Like It to Be Too Messy.
Deliverance
Story Time in Heck
I’d rather have been Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, one of my favorite Old Testament stories, plus I always liked saying their names, but since there was only just the one of me I settled for thinking of myself as a modern-day Daniel in the lions’ den as I strode in a light rain past the free hot chocolate tables and the not-so-free donut trucks and into Riverbend High School in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The lobby had been converted for the day—the first Saturday in December—into what looked like the tail end of a yard sale when all that’s left are a bunch of crappy books laid out on folding tables, plus a couple of bowls filled with rubber balls and pencils.
A Modest Proposal
Being for the Benefit of the Citizens of Our Glorious County, Their Children, and Future Faithful Generations (With Apologies to Jonathan Swift)
Etcetera
-30-
After 25 issues of Pie & Chai, Janet and I are taking a break, though I’m not sure if we’re coming back and neither is
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Late October
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
Charc Bites
“How ‘bout them hors d’oeuvres ain’t they sweet? Little piece of cheese, little piece of meat!” –Mason Williams
