Category Archives: youth

DOWN THE COAST By Peter Nolan Smith

October 1, 2022 – 2:43 pm

Skyline Drive crested a hill and the bright California sun crowned the hundreds of identical houses snaking up the streets of Daly City with a golden nimbus. Smoke from sizzling meat floated above countless backyards, as suburban families celebrated Memorial Day with holiday barbecues. I longed for a seared hamburger and a beer, but tramped […]

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THE HOLE OF HEAVEN by Peter Nolan Smith

July 27, 2022 – 6:16 am

According to the Old Testament God banished Adam and Eve from Eden for eating the forbidden apple and this Original Sin exiled their descendants to this mortal coil, however humans have repeatedly defied this divine decree with attempts to recreate Heaven on Earth and in 1965 the teenagers of Boston’s South Shore made out at […]

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Da Quincy Quarries – 1994

July 27, 2022 – 6:12 am
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George, Washington 1972

February 21, 2022 – 6:08 pm

Back in late August 1972 my college friend Ptrov Sinski and I hitchhiked west from Seattle. A rancher left us off at exit 149, serving George, Washington, a small farming community surrounded by endless fields of ripening wheat. The two of us ignored the sign forbidding hitchhiking, but within ten minutes a Highway Patrol car […]

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IMPURE AT HEART by Peter Nolan Smith

February 10, 2022 – 7:01 pm

In the early 60s the nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students that our sins were punished in the burning fires of Hell, until then Mother Superior subjected the palms of potential heretics and religious backsliders to a cane. Whisperers and jesters suffered the yardstick. All of her victims were boys, for […]

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