VOLUME 16 - NO. 1 & 2

Intimate Voices, Ordinary Lives
Stories of Fact and Fiction

EDITOR'S NOTE

In terms of geologic time, it doesn't mean much that the Comet Hale-Bopp won't be lighting up our skies again for nearly 3,000 years. And scientists say it's not much more than a big, dirty iceball anyway, with a tail of gases millions of miles long. A remnant from the time when the solar system was formed. Can you imagine it? When that very same iceball, certainly a little chunkier, appeared in the Babylonian sky, what did the sages of the day have to say ?

But that's not the story. I have no doubt that the now-named Comet Hale-Bopp deepened their sense of awe, as it has ours. What we share with those ancients, of course, is our humanity, punctuated by the beating of our hearts: human time. Our precarious condition on this small world hasn't really changed all that much in 3,000 years. What we have to hang on to are the stories we tell, stories that link us to each other across time, stories that, ultimately, define who we are.

Like all of us, the characters of Intimate Voices, Ordinary Lives move inexorably through their lives and, at various junctures, try to make sense of their situations. Some of these twenty-seven stories are fact and some are fiction. Together they create a tenement of voices - some you'll recognize immediately, and others you won't - they're newcomers to the block. The richness of this community of stories is in its vulnerable people and its unflinching honesty. there are so many unanswered and unanswerable questions - so much we can never know. Finding harmony and peace in the human condition is not easy. Yet, within each of these stories is a small gift - an opportunity to experience a somewhat larger world, a personal invitation to search for the truth.

So when you climb the old stoop, notice where the concrete is cracked, and the ants (or is it termites?) have built a nest. If you reach for the railing on your left, remember it's unstable, rusted under a peeling layer of black enamel, ready to fall out of the brick. You've heard that the super is lazy - asleep in the middle of the afternoon - you can believe that, for sure. In fact, you know no one who has ever seen him - only rumors about what he does in the dead of night with that ancient boiler in the basement - greasing, cajoling, hammering. But you've come this far so you might as well come in, past the mailboxes, through the dark, windowless lobby, and up the marble steps to the third floor - apartment 3-F, to be exact - where the table is already set and you can almost smell the cinnamon and the apples (or is it something else? the sweetness of insecticide?). And, as you push your face toward the milky peephole in the door's dark veneer, you may even begin to feel hungry. Yes, very hungry.

Ronald Spatz