Martin Levowitz

Dropping bombs on civilians, including children, is unmannerly. Firing rockets at your neighbors isn’t nice. Hiding rocket launchers in residential neighborhoods or near hospitals is naughty. Stealing your neighbors’ land is unkind. Announcing that you intend to annihilate the folks next door generates hard feelings. Confining your neighbors behind massive walls and restricting their freedoms, […]

After an art opening in Tucson, a bunch of us went out to eat. Sitting right across from me was someone I didn’t know, a pleasant-seeming woman, in her forties, I’d surmise, whose salient trait, for the moment at least, was a rather extraordinary display of cleavage. Her bosom was fairly erupting out of a […]

In biology class they made a big fuss over the body’s organ systems: respiratory, circulatory, digestive, etc., usually leaving the excretory system for last, both because it resides at the end of the line, and because, to those who’ve been potty trained, excretion will always seem a bit funny or embarrassing. Evolution, too, discourages comfort […]

One sunny autumn day, 12 years ago, our next-to-last dog, Punk, was cashing in his chips. We took him up Mt. Lemmon to a meadow in the woods, his favorite place. He had barely enough strength to walk. We helped him get down from the car. He had to yield to gravity, and wobbled down […]

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: (And I damn well think it should concern someone.) Crawling around on my hands and knees outdoors at night in dangerous neighborhoods is not part of my normal routine, but that’s how the paramedics found me in your parking lot at 12th and Valencia in Tucson on the night of […]

Big Steve, a contractor friend from Oracle, left Arizona in the 1970s and moved to Galveston, Texas, which, in the mid-1800s, had been a sort of Gulf Coast Bisbee: a thriving, deep-watershipping boomtown. Alas, the city’s boom went bust when Houston had its harbor dredged. Poor Galveston just disappeared from view, except for a bad […]

Here’s an old Sufi teaching story: Walking home late at night through the quiet streets of his village, a man is startled by a loud noise. Turning the corner, he sees a dog and a donkey, fighting. “Friends, friends” he implores, rushing between them, “Surely there’s some better way to settle your differences.” Whereupon the […]

Here comes the summer heat again. We open all the windows every night, then close them when we get up. This works quite well. I haven’t yet been on the roof to flush the cooler or replace its pads. Even more delinquently, I haven’t yet installed our window screens, so while the house is cooling […]