What’s past is prologue.—Shakespeare, The Tempest 1. 365 Clare Island rises like a rumpled green wizard’s hat at the edge of Clew Bay, a single slouching mountain off the Irish coast framed by the open Atlantic. My backpack and I are gliding toward the island’s quay on the afternoon ferry, under wildly bright August sun. …
Italicized lines are from James Joyce’s Ulysses (Random House, 1986 reissue). ms cuello cause she never give up on me even though theres no hope I liked the way I was portrayed in the note. I saved it in an overflowing binder filled with thank-you notes from students. I had no idea who wrote it. …
My friend Don told me about how his mother passed into death. A tough Italian American, strict and scolding, she became pliable as she neared her end. She gentled and gave up all her fights. Don, her primary caregiver, was there when the death rattle came to her throat. “You can go now,” he said …
Cradle Catholic. Spicy chrism, baptism, incense, First Communion in a white dress, black burned palm fronds crunching across my forehead as the priest drew the Ash Wednesday cross. Belief was my heritage, passed down from immigrant grandmothers who kept cauldrons of chicken blood simmering on the stove. Rituals, saints, gore. Jesus bleeding openly, his eyes …
I remember that summer before junior year, how Catherine and I lay side by side on a grassy knoll in downtown Charlottesville, watching the Fourth of July fireworks, whispering between booms. Children of rural suburbs, we felt stranded, too far from downtown to get mixed up in the college-kid mayhem and not deep enough in …
Right in front of the staircase leading to the college library doors, a huge vertical bronze wrist leaned slightly backward, its fingers half-opening, half-closed, its palm pierced through with a massive bronze nail. “Here’s the Hand of Christ,” I told Victor. I searched his face, wondering what he was thinking about our Catholic college replete …
In early March 2020, on my last visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art, I waited for the one o’clock tour at the bottom of the stairs leading to the galleries. The docent arrived and led our little group up the staircase, to the galleries on the left, as she shared bits of trivia about …
For the life of him, my father cannot decide where he wants to be buried. He’s narrowed it down to two potential sites: McGandy Bluffs overlooking the White River, near his birthplace in southern Indiana, or Prairie Grove Cemetery, his current place of employment, just a few hours north in Fort Wayne. “The perk about …
It’s a pity almost nothing is known of Li Chun, master stonemason of the Sui Dynasty. While Trajan’s collapsed bridge rotted and the Persians invented chess, legend says Li Chun crafted the Anji Bridge by suspending twenty-five hundred tons of limestone over the Xiao River in a single night, creating what one poet has called …
My older sisters warned me about Ellen Osborne, the high-school substitute teacher with a big mouth. I can see her framed in the classroom’s doorjamb, her eyes dark and sharp like a hawk’s. Despite being a Quaker, Ms. Osborne wasn’t big on the virtue of silence. She preferred to shout the latest news down the …