Etan Patz‘s killer was finally convicted yesterday. The 6-year-old boy went missing on May 25, 1979, after he left home to catch the school bus. The bus stop was just two blocks from the family’s apartment in Lower Manhattan. Patz was the first child to have his picture published on the side of a milk carton […]
Jacob Wetterling: Remains of Boy Abducted 27 Years Ago Found
Jacob Wetterling was abducted and killed 27 years ago today. It was October 22, 1989, when Jacob, along with his brother and best friend, rode their bikes down a rural Minnesota road. A masked man appeared from out of nowhere and took Jacob and gunpoint. The 11-year-old was never again seen alive. Just last month, that […]
40-Something
I remember when your face was covered with acne And the acne was covered with panstick. Max Factor, fair. You needed beige to avoid the line of demarcation. There was no distinction between Your ambition and love. They were the same. I was mischievous. I made a rope our of your 32A bras and hung […]
Monique Daniels Was Reported Missing 20 Years Ago This Month
Twenty years ago this month, Oklahoma teenager Monique Daniels was reported missing. About a year ago, someone who knew Monique wrote to me about her disappearance. A few months later I wrote this commentary for KOSU Radio, the text of which I’m publishing for the first time today on this blog. Missing Monique Daniels The […]
Field Journal: Week 47
I want to live an honest life. Writing helps me neutralize my shame and face my failures so they don’t control me. I need to write to be healed, one word, one post at a time. Kurt Vonnegut said, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the […]
Check in the Lost and Found
Have You Seen Me? Check in the Lost and Found. “…That’s part of the psychoanalytic process, that you are finding things that have been there all along, but were not available to awareness.” — Mark Gerald, New York Psychoanalyst I’ve been passing signs of missing cats and lost dogs my entire life and not really […]
Jacob Wetterling and Why the Bike Rides Ended: A Memoir of Generation X Childhood and Youth
This is Jacob Wetterling. 1978-1989. I first caught up with Justin, “a quiet guy in the Midwest, waiting to be seen…” after I read something he wrote on the now-defunct Open Salon. I liked it so much I asked him if he’d be interested in writing a guest post occasionally for this site. Shortly thereafter, he […]