Pushcart 2026 L: Year Fifty

Sometimes, I realize while staring at the billions of suns in the night sky, 50 years is a really long time. I can’t comprehend what has happened. The whole Pushcart span is a mystery to me as much as the night sky. Why has this series survived? Why have so many thousands of writers and editors contributed enthusiastically to that survival? Why has it meant so very much to so very many? Bill Henderson, Introduction I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time lately: how it seems to take forever for the present to become the future, but it becomes the past in the blink of an eye. I often fall into these retrospective moods upon the death of a celebrity I grew up with, but this time around, it’s more about the USA’s semiquincentennial (I appreciate the opportunity to pick up these adjectives) just celebrated this past weekend. I remember the Bicentennial. The country was still recovering from Vietnam and Watergate, disco was pushing folk-rock off the airwaves, and Bicentennial…