He kept the things that were best. Things blue, and white, and the colors of skin in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Cincinnati, San Francisco. He kept them poorly; he threw away the translucent box cover for the book on the body I’d given him, the one so dear I returned to the shop’s shelves my …
My wife, LauraBeth, and I bought our first house in 2006, in the New Jersey suburbs. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three. We had money for a down payment because her mother had died and left behind some insurance money. We purchased the house for $175,000, at what I later learned was an obscene …
They gaggle into the pool hall trailing black feathers every Saturday after work, not really girls but women. But I am so old, women that young are still girls and my twenty-two-year-old coworker is Son, can you get me the broom. Don’t “Son” me! Javier says. What do I know? They arrive, the five of …
Little is known about the history of fog. But it is water—billions of microscopic droplets suspended above the earth—and it comes eight ways. Hovering close to the ground, it is the most common, radiation fog. Floating above the lowest points in Appalachia, it is valley fog. Fog drawn inland from the Pacific, or the San …
I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s work at the onset of that long fever known as adolescence. We didn’t have smartphones back then to rescue us from the twin plagues of doubt and boredom. So we walked around with ancient devices tucked into our back pockets. These devices had only one app. You opened them and scanned …
Liveaboards In my new island life, I am a woman on the beach, all wrapped against the wind. It is not sunny. I am no longer young. The skies are gray; perhaps it is misting or has misted or will mist. I am not old. The water is choppy, little whitecaps rolling in like glimpses …
1 I ask them what they think about. Truly, whatever’s on your mind. Write it down. Anonymously. The mundane. The trivial. The serious. The sublime. Work, one writes. Sleep. Dexter. My best friend’s cystic fibrosis. Stress, says another. Responsibility. Israel. Career. Money, another says. Sandwiches. Parties. Girlfriends. Being an asshole, someone writes, and following, in …
Americana While my son and I build with blocks in the playroom, YouTube becomes our jukebox, time machine, history lesson, giving us Jean Ritchie, Odetta, songs its autoplay chooses, Vera Hall singing about a man who runs, a man in chains, a man who gets killed. Boil Vera worked as a cook and washerwoman in …
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough. —Robin Wall Kimmerer Every year around this time, a small frog shows up in my mother’s garden. A Pacific tree frog, also known as a “chorus frog,” with a bright-green body iridescent against sprigs of wild lilac or browned petals of …