My Life in Jeopardy Again
I’ve had numerous close calls,
Starting in childhood when the fire
Department rescued me
And the neighbors stood
On their porches and cheered,
Then being saved from
Falling off a mountain cliff.
Then many other close calls that make my
Wife shudder to hear me talk about.
I could write a book about close calls.
When You Grow Up In Chicago
Chicago is the home of great
Financial institutions and universities, but
When you grow up in Chicago as I did
You coexist with gangsters. You know their
Names and nicknames and you
Read the papers about them and hear about
Them, or they live in your neighborhood.
Chicago is the city of neighborhoods.
I dated a famous gangster’s sister–a lovely girl–
But her family lived in shame. Her brother was
Slain because he double-crossed other gangsters,
His body found bullet-riddled as double-crosser’s
Bodies usually are.
Here are four close calls I’ve had.
In a North Side Chicago Bar at Two A.M.
Gangland Killer
In the bar at 2:00 A.M. on the fading
End of a magnificent summer night that had been warm
But turned pleasantly cool like a breath of October
Were four people who had nothing in common:
A waitress, a bartender, a drunk man, and I.
The waitress and I were twenty-two or three then,
She was pretty, her complexion as fresh as clover.
Her periwinkle blue eyes made you recall a sky you once saw.
Both of us were as care-free as the magic of our youth,
She younger than wherever her life would lead, I not yet
The writer I would soon be. We never knew each other’s name.
She was fearless when she said to
The surly drunk man everyone all night had been afraid of
And kept their distance from because he seemed to be
A dangerous man, “Sir, I can’t serve anyone who has
Had too much to drink. Do you understand? ”
She had manners. She was a nice girl.
The drunk man then spit in her face and I
Went over there and chastised him, saying to him
That he must apologize to her,
That in civilized society you don’t spit on people–I said,
“That’s something everybody’s supposed to know,” and he
Cursed me and growled that he now intended
To kill me.
Pissed, I stood in front of him and said,
“Go ahead pull out a gun right now
And shoot me.” He cursed me again and furiously
Stormed out the front door. Then the bartender
Said to me that I had picked the worst possible man
To antagonize: “When he said he would
Kill you he really could. He is a murderer.
He tortures and kills people. That’s what the man does.
That’s his profession. This is serious.
He’s in that car at the curb waiting for you to
Come out. If I were you I wouldn’t plan on
Living a long life.”
The waitress and I hugged goodbye, never
To see each other again, then slipped
Out the back door and down the dark alley
Laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation–
“How will we explain this to anyone?”–
Running for our lives.
When I was seventeen I rode freight trains across America for six months for the sake of adventure, living the way hobos live, and had close calls daily, my life continually at risk.
Nature’s Cruelty:
The Bitter Cold of Night
Cold settles savagely on Utah’s
Great Salt Lake desert late at night.
I had reached the desert by freight train
After a scorching day,
The red sun pulsating in the sky
Like a throbbing heart. The temperature then
Fell precipitously. Then there was an ice storm.
Then nothing to warm me, exposed to the open air.
How in the unspeakable cold of interminable night I suffered,
Hoping not to freeze to death by morning and be
Found in a boxcar as stiff as a six-foot plank of wood,
Shot at, Chased By Dogs
When my freight train reached Kelso-Longview
The railroad police were waiting,
Holding the leash of a German shepherd
In one hand, waving a gun in the other.
Shouting and running, I, youngest, running fastest,
Hobos leaped or fell from the cars and dashed
In every direction, chased by the cops
Firing their weapons everywhere.
As I ran I laughed at how out
Of my element I was, far from Chicago, and how ludicrous
The whole scene must appear–a hundred
Running hobos and bulls, men firing revolvers,
Other men praying not to be shot,
Ferocious dogs snapping at my heels,
Shots grazing my head.
Milk: The Ordeal of Thirst
The freight train we caught hadn’t stopped
Going on three days and our canteens
Were empty. We were worried about water.
We had never been as thirsty.
We were losing hope. How long can a
Human live without water? When would
This train stop, free us, and let us live?
I fell asleep in the heat and dreamed
That I opened the refrigerator
At home and saw every shelf loaded
With bottles of milk.
Then in a second dream
I saw waterfalls of milk spraying
And roaring down like Victoria Falls–
Streams of milk, rivers of milk–
An ocean of cold milk. My friend asked if I was
Still alive and I answered that I was.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Milk.”
“Milk?”
“Milk.”
The train stopped
And I jumped off onto ground.
I found a providential water pump
And filled our canteens–the
Stream of water from the pump
Pouring over my boots.
We drank the foul tasting
Egg water and found it life-saving.
© 2025 David J. Rogers
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Pitch Black Nights
Given the gift of exceptional powers of 
Of spoons against coffee cups
Butterflies, you and I,
Snow drifts smother every highway,
Every memoirist, (as well as every writer of fiction and personal essays and every poet and playwright) should strive to make that attainable talent to evoke the past a part of their repertoire of skills. They can then call on that talent every day as they compose, and it will bring their writing vividly to life.
There were not enough living room chairs to go around when the full family came over, but there were the dining room chairs to carry in and also for an overflow crowd there were gray metal fold-up chairs stenciled on the back in white “Property of Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Aunt Sarah stored them in the hall closet hidden behind her prized full-length fur coat, and was embarrassed for strangers to see them, for fear they believe the impossible, but conceivable–that she had pilfered the chairs from that house of God.
On a kitchen wall, above the old serviceable stove, was fastened an Elgin clock that ran fast, forcing everyone to subtract twenty-two minutes a day if they wished for some reason to be accurate, and in the corner of the living room, close to the large drafty window fronting Austin Avenue, was an impressive century- old grandfather clock whose big bronze pendulum, to the entire family’s collective memory, had never moved.
The breathtaking Hawaiian Islands are an inappropriate place to become ill, but Honolulu, their state capital, largest city, and principal port, is where my younger sister Sharon had chosen to live–where the last months of her life she was hospitalized. In her early twenties she had left Chicago where we had grown up and I still live and she had visited one exquisite picture post card place after another in Spain, France, the South Pacific, and the Mediterranean, and so on, in search of the single place where she thought she would be happiest living and had found it.
On the nights of my visit after seeing her I would walk on the beaches, reflecting on the day, finding restful the fresh air and coolness, and sleeping at Sharon and Ron’s apartment. On the kitchen floor there was a scale to measure the dwindling of my sister’s existence, and sheets of paper on a clipboard suspended from a nail on the wall that recorded her declining weight: ninety-eight pounds, ninety, eighty-eight…and a calendar that had Xs on days she wasn’t healthy enough to work that in recent months had become all Xs. Against a wall there was a full-length gold-framed mirror that in the past she had looked into. The mirror was dusty.
There was no need for Kathy and me to discuss where Sharon stood. It needn’t be said that it wouldn’t be long and that soon Sharon would be gone entirely from my life and from the world. I knew that the moment coming from the airport and entering her hospital room and putting down my bag when I saw with a shock how puny Sharon looked now. The illness had given her an old woman’s body that had been ravaged by suffering there in that bed that was now her final home–so skinny–all bones–very sick–dying. The pain had turned her black hair white and it was short from the treatment and no longer long. Her once-pretty face was gaunt, her cheeks gray, her body very tired. Her long pianist’s fingers were so thin that her ring had slipped off and was lost. But there in her gray, lonely, fading beauty there was still about her that same gentleness you could ruffle with your breath, the same spirit in her fierce eyes, the same poise, and the same elegance. Looking into my eyes, imagining what I was seeing, Sharon had clutched her gown across her chest in embarrassment –covering herself in shame–still a modest woman–and said, breaking my heart, sucking the breath out of my lungs, “I’m a mess aren’t I?,” and I had replied to her, “Shar, you are beautiful.”
the happy girl and boy that we had once been, getting ready to ride our bikes to the library. The gray interior lights were dimmed low, as if the plane itself were drowsy. Everything was silent but for the deep hum of the engines, the other passengers asleep. I wanted to prepare myself for what it would be like now without a sister, my parents without a daughter, my children without an aunt.
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