Feature Stories
You go away to college, and you have a certain percentage of friends who don’t go. Well, within the first year and a half, you have nothing in common. You’re going to class full-time, they’re working at McDonald’s.”
“Honey, honey, don’t run! Please, honey, stay there!” The girl strains forward and yells from the back seat of the patrol car. But as the officer door-knocks, Honey bails through the living room window into …
BUDD, THE PRESIDENT OF OUR MEDICAL GROUP, TOLD ME A FEW WEEKS AGO, “IT IS MY GOAL NEVER TO BECOME AN INTERESTING PATIENT.” I hadn’t seen Sheryl in 19 months when she showed up for …
Turn the knob, open the screen door… Wham! A roiling ball of shelties hurtles against it and slams it shut. Yipyipyipyipyipyip! Jumpjumpjump. Yip. Yip. Jumpjumpjump. Yip! “Scat, Jazz, Riff. Hey, guys. Quiet down.” Yip. Yurp. …
A story shared between men, both in their 20s, both fathers: “I’m coming up Montezuma, and I see a pickup truck in the left-turn lane with its hazard lights on. I pull over to help …
He pointed out the apartment where, in 1992, two Hmong boys had been shot by Crips. With his finger Vang traced the path across the lawn that one boy had taken as he tried to escape.
At 6:00 a.m. it’s light enough to see across the field in front of us, even though the sun hasn’t yet risen. A shotgun report rings out 50 yards to our right.
Looking at the mortal remains of an 86-year-old Portuguese man in his coffin at the Beardsley-Mitchell Funeral Home in Ocean Beach on a fine spring afternoon I scrutinize his powdered and bald head, his thin …
Barbara Payton died in San Diego — on the bathroom floor of her parents’ Mission Hills home at 1901 Titus Street — on May 8, 1967. Her death certificate listed cause of death as “acute …
He goes by both. Whether “Buddy,” the two-syllable synonym for pal, or the more mature-sounding “Bud,” the single-syllable term for what is young and unfinished, both fit. Bud McElroy, at 39, seems easygoing and uncomplicated. …
“We had to cross two fences,” he tells me. “One we had to go under, and the other we had to climb over. It was dark and the fence was too high for me.”
Was This My Fault? “I THINK SHE HAS PNEUMONIA.” Anne, a nurse-practitioner student to whom I’m teaching outpatient medicine, was right. Flo, a proud, stubborn, wiry, 72-year-old African-American had called me earlier that day hoping …
“If, like, three or four guys are sitting there, I have to be polite, but I have to take the cart. If you come straight in there like some bad guy, they will give you a hard time.”
Ed Madruga, who owned the Paramount, recalled, “Two weeks afterwards, the government [took] all the tuna boats. Didn’t ask, just took ’em.” The government painted the whitehulled ships military gray and leased them “until victory.”
"Most of the maps in America are not readable. The writing is so small. Thomas Brothers is on the better side, but Rand McNally, for example, the printing is just too small.”
I am looking at a job application for Jack In The Box and trying to talk myself out of turning the thing in. I have enough Prozac to see me through this — it is …