In third grade I became a devout rock and roll fan. Over the next decade I’d spend my meager allowance on occasional 45 rpm singles but couldn’t afford full albums.
As an adult in the nineties I set my sights on collecting all the great albums I’d missed in my youth. One Saturday morning I brought home the psychedelic classic Electric Music for the Mind and Body, by Country Joe and the Fish. I’d seen the band’s leader, Country Joe McDonald, play acoustic folk songs at a pub in my Berkeley neighborhood, but I’d never heard this album. I listened to it all day, obsessed with its beauty and lamenting that I’d been born too late. What I would have given, I thought, to have seen Country Joe and the Fish onstage.
The next day I was flipping through the East Bay Express in a café when I saw an ad for a concert that same day, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of People’s Park in Berkeley. My eyes swam when I saw the words: “Music by Country Joe and Friends.” The show started in fifteen minutes. Abandoning my bagel and coffee, I darted out of the café.
I arrived at the park just as the band was tuning up, and I made my way toward the front, ending up five feet from the stage.
The next two hours were ethereal bliss. The band performed every song on Electric Music and more. After the show ended, I remained in front of the stage, basking in that holy moment. Of all the brag-worthy concerts I’ve seen, that free show in People’s Park is my favorite: truly an unexpected gift.
Tom Corona
Los Osos, California
The sun was going down quickly over the Sea of Galilee, and my biking partners and I had nowhere to sleep. I searched Google Maps for a patch of flat ground where we could cook dinner and lay out our camping pads.
We were cycling through Israel from Jaffa to the Golan Heights and back. The following week my brother was scheduled to marry a lovely Israeli woman. I’d felt anxious about the trip and my brother’s decision to move to such a profoundly troubled place. But I was there to officiate his wedding, and I figured my family might as well do what we do best: learn about a place from the seats of our touring bikes.
We had been riding on beaches, down dusty farm roads, and through mountains for five days. Each night I read Sandy Tolan’s book The Lemon Tree, a nonfiction account of a Jewish and a Palestinian family who had called the same house home—one before and one after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. I was absorbing my ancestral homeland’s bloody past while passing through its glorious landscape, trying to make sense of it all.
The map showed an outdoor museum that appeared to have a spot where we could sleep. The gate at the entrance was locked, but we lifted our bicycles up and over. Inside, a triangular arch of steel sheets formed a sculptural passageway to the hills below. Trilingual plaques surrounded the art installation, a memorial for Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli right-wing extremist. Rabin had helped broker the Oslo Accords, a step toward a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinian people. Though I was saddened to be reminded of his murder, I was relieved to have found a place to sleep. We cooked dinner over our camp stove, laid our pads under the emerging stars, and took out our books.
Just then car headlights approached the gate. We heard young men speaking boisterous Arabic and saw them making their way down the hill with flashlights. Had they seen us lifting our bikes over the gate and come to make us leave? We were trespassers, after all, with no right to be there. Our only choice was to approach them and say hello before they stumbled upon our camp.
“Laila tov!” I called out. I thought this was Hebrew for “Good evening,” but it’s more like “Good night.” My mistake made the men laugh. We quickly realized we had no common language except for a few words of Spanish. We understood, however, when one of the men said “vodka.” They motioned for us to come up the hill, where they set up a table and camp chairs and began to grill meat and pour drinks.
Using Google Translate and our phones’ photo libraries, we learned a little about each other. The men were ATV and motorcycle enthusiasts who thought biking up and down mountains was silly. One of them was a police officer, and he showed me a picture of his girlfriend. I played the latest Bad Bunny songs on their speaker, and they approved heartily of the thumping reggaeton. We drank more vodka, then I told them my companions and I needed to go to sleep. We had a long ride the next day.
“Laila tov,” I said, this time in the correct context. They laughed and wished us good night.
In my sleeping bag my head spun from the alcohol, the adrenaline of our surprise meeting, and the ember of hope kindled by our friendly encounter on a spot that memorialized the pain between our peoples.
The next morning I woke to a text message my brother had sent to all the family members in Israel for his wedding: “I’m hoping many of you are sleeping through this. There are rockets being fired from Gaza, which started at 6:30 this morning. The local media is shocked, as it has been an incredibly quiet last few months, and we are still trying to understand what is going on.”
It was October 7, 2023.
Liza Burkin
Providence, Rhode Island
I don’t remember how the button that sets the clock in my Subaru broke. Maybe it happened during a move, when the car was overloaded with furniture. Over the years a succession of dead car batteries reset it, until the clock became more and more disconnected from reality. My kids started calling the clock’s time zone “Car Time.”
At 7:00 AM Car Time (2:19 PM Pacific Standard Time) they would say, “I’m hungry. It’s time for breakfast,” then squeal with laughter, snack crumbs flying from their mouths and landing between the seats.
“I’m sooo tired,” my six-year-old might say dramatically when the clock read 1:07 AM on the way to school. “Yawn, yawn, yawn.”
At first an inconvenience, Car Time became an inside joke to entertain us during the mundane comings and goings of school and games and practices.
The Subaru’s battery recently died again. The transmission is starting to go. I don’t want to sell the car, though I know the day is coming. The stains on the seats tell stories of camping trips. The sand on the floor reminds me of afternoons at the beach. Carefully placed animal stickers circle the broken clock.
Sarah Ives
San Francisco, California
The summer of 1966 was idyllic for me. My days at the University of Texas at Austin were filled with classes, Longhorn Band practices, and time with friends. Every weekday I had lunch with two of my bandmates at the drugstore on Guadalupe Street, next to campus. When the Coca-Cola clock on the wall said 11:45, we would leave for our afternoon activities.
On August 1 that summer, as we ordered our food, a twenty-five-year-old man dressed in workman’s coveralls was wheeling a footlocker containing an arsenal toward the UT Tower across the street. My friends and I were having an animated conversation when I glanced at the clock and saw it was 11:50. We were late. As we paid for our food, the cashier told us we shouldn’t go outside: someone was shooting a gun.
We left anyway and looked around, thinking perhaps the bank down the street had been robbed. We heard sharp cracks coming from the mall in front of the tower and decided some fool was shooting off firecrackers. “Guys,” I said, “this is nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I turned to head down the sidewalk and suddenly experienced a chill on that scorching Texas day. A bullet whistled past my right ear and struck a thirty-eight-year-old graduate student who was standing four feet from me in the open door of a newsstand. He died hours later in the hospital.
My friends and I ran back inside the drugstore as the sniper continued to shoot people on Guadalupe, killing four more and wounding ten.
My pals waited for a lull in the shooting, then scampered across the street to the Student Union Building. I stayed behind. Someone in the store found a transistor radio. For the next ninety minutes we listened to commentary about the massacre. Around 1:24, Austin police officers managed to reach the sniper in the tower and kill him.
If I had left at 11:45 as usual, I’d have been on the mall when the sniper opened fire.
Forrest Preece
Austin, Texas
As I ran my fingers over her scalp, my daughter’s hair fell out in clumps. She touched a bald patch, letting her fingertips dance along the bare skin before pulling up the hood of her sweatshirt. Her medication pumps beeped to let us know there was a clog. I pressed the call button for the nurse as my daughter’s teacher continued talking from a little square on the laptop screen.
“I’m glad I’m not in the classroom,” my daughter whispered later that night. “I don’t have to see anyone while I’m bald.”
When I tell people my daughter was diagnosed with cancer two months into the COVID pandemic, they say how terrible that must have been, and I nod in agreement. It’s harder to admit the truth—that the timing was a relief.
The nurses and social workers at the hospital would often tell me about the resources that would have been available before the pandemic: support groups, playtimes, hospital visits from athletes, opportunities to connect with other “cancer families.” I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do less than to meet the families of other kids who had cancer. It would have cemented my membership in a club I’d never wanted to be a member of.
I was glad that, during the two years my daughter underwent cancer treatment, her friends were socially isolating too. Imagine the heartbreak she would have felt, locked away in the hospital while texts from friends at birthday parties and sleepovers rolled through her phone. Instead there was nothing for her to miss.
When the first day of fourth grade arrived, she was one of twenty-eight squares on a computer screen. She kept her camera off, so no one knew she was joining from a hospital room. The pandemic allowed her to pass as a regular kid.
Elizabeth Austin
Newtown, Pennsylvania
On our first vacation together he tried to teach me how to two-step in the living room of our rented cabin. He was a Texan and a drummer; the dance’s rhythm came to him as easily as breathing, but I stepped on his toes again and again in a wine-drunk haze. “Left, right, left, right,” he instructed.
After that, whenever a country song came up on a playlist in our apartment, he’d set his drink down on the kitchen island and take my hand. I’d quickly lose the beat. “You might ruin my boots if we ever go two-stepping for real,” he would say.
Our jobs forced us to live apart, and I found myself in a city with many country-music bars. Before his first visit I scouted out a suitable venue, complete with a mechanical bull. “Bring your boots,” I told him. For a full week before he arrived, I blasted country on my car stereo and drummed on my steering wheel: Left, right, left, right.
When we finally stood under the dance-floor lights, he asked if I was ready. I said yes but spent the whole song watching his feet, which I stepped on anyway. Afterward, breathless, I apologized, and he laughed and kissed my forehead.
Later at home I came out of the shower and found him brushing the scuff marks from his boots. He smiled at me and said, “Let’s do that again.”
Nina Michiko Tam
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
On Christmas night 2004 some friends and I had a dinner party on my deck in Krabi, Thailand. Among the guests was Yaya, a local hotelier, who owned a small sloop I’d been eyeing. I’d grown up with boats, and the sloop would be perfect for exploring neighboring islands and the calm waters of the Andaman Sea. A mutual friend had told me Yaya might be open to selling her, so I broached the subject, and he was eager to make a deal. I went to sleep visualizing the adventures I would have.
The next day dawned clear and bright. My morning routine typically included a swim, but I was hungover from the party, and I dawdled at the house, chatting with my friend Nui, who had stayed the night.
As Nui sat filing her nails, we heard the crunch of feet running through dry leaves below my house. I heard a voice call out in Thai and asked Nui what they’d said. She replied, “Run, Merry! Big water coming!”
I’d recently read Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa, about the 1883 volcanic eruption in Indonesia that caused a tsunami, killing tens of thousands of people. I immediately ran for the stairs, calling for Nui to follow, and headed to a trail that wound up a high hill to a resort overlooking the jungle and the sea. People were streaming along the path. I left my flip-flops with the many pairs of sandals at the entrance to the resort and followed the crowd to the upper veranda.
In the distance we could see the wave: a long white stripe of frothing water, followed by two shorter white lines that reminded me of Santa’s eyebrows. We heard that a tsunami had hit Ko Phi Phi, an hour to the south of us. People there had phoned relatives in our area to warn them it was coming. Many aftershocks were forecast, so we stayed at the resort overnight.
The next day I went home to survey the damage. My bungalow was intact, but there was a berm of debris stretching across the yard where the water had stopped advancing. The nearby beach was littered with boats torn up from anchor. Among them was Yaya’s sloop, with a huge hole in her side. My neighbor, a sailor, said I should be grateful: I’d been spared the expense of keeping a boat. I was just glad I hadn’t gone swimming.
Merry Winslow
Mendocino, California
In 1975, when I was nineteen, I hitchhiked across the US with my best friend, Jana. We ended up in San Antonio, Texas, where I started nursing school and landed a job as a cashier in the hospital coffee shop. A short time later Jana was hired there too. After her first shift I showed her how to take public transportation home from work, which required catching one bus to the transit station downtown, then taking a second to our house. As we got on the second bus, we saw three cute dudes with backpacks and sat next to them.
“Where are you headed?” I asked one boy.
He told me they’d come from Rochester, New York, to visit a friend in San Antonio, but they had lost the friend’s phone number and address. After trying and failing for three days to track him down, they were headed to the Greyhound station to return home.
“Is your friend’s name Brian Ferris?” I asked.
An incredulous smile swept across his face. “Yeah! Do you know him?”
I explained that he had been my roommate until a couple of weeks earlier and had mentioned that some out-of-town friends were coming to visit. I told the guys they could come back to my place and call Brian.
As the bus rumbled down the road, dropping off passengers on its last run of the night, I didn’t see any of the landmarks near my house. Jana and I had gotten on the wrong bus. Luckily we just happened to be passing through the neighborhood where Brian lived.
The five of us got off, crossed the street, and rang his bell. Brian opened the door, looked momentarily confused, then broke into a laugh.
Mary Troester
Chico, California
That Tuesday started like any other. At 7:00 AM my mom woke up and got ready for work. She made sure the babysitter had everything she needed and kissed my infant brother goodbye. Then she walked to the tram in Bayonne, New Jersey, rode it to Hoboken, and boarded the ferry to Manhattan. She took a taxi from the dock to the World Trade Center, entered the South Tower, and took the elevator to the 103rd floor.
Around 8:00 AM she stopped by her office to drop off her briefcase and greet her assistant, Kim. Then she headed to a conference room to meet with a new client. After the meeting she returned to her office. Looking out her window at a bird’s-eye view of the city, she noticed a plane approaching. Curious where it might land, she watched its progress.
At 8:46 AM she saw it slice into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She rushed out of her office to tell Kim what had happened. Kim told my mother to grab her bag; they were leaving.
On the ground floor they found chaos. After becoming separated from Kim, my mom decided she needed to get as far away as possible. Trying to hail a taxi would have only slowed her down, so she walked thirty-three blocks in high heels to the ferry line. The air was smoky and tainted with the smell of burning fuel. She briefly stopped at a phone booth to call my dad and my grandparents, who she thought must be watching the news. She managed to leave a message with my dad.
At 9:03 AM the second plane hit the South Tower.
She thought of her colleagues, her friends in the building, and her children at home. Tears fell as she boarded a ferry and sat down. When she reached Hoboken, no trains were running. She had to walk the seven miles to our house.
She opened the front door almost three hours later and took her baby from the sitter.
Her quick action in the seventeen minutes before the second plane hit saved her life and allowed her, two years later, to give birth to me.
Margaux Rawson
Ithaca, New York
My family was staying at my grandparents’ house for the holidays. I was the youngest child there. On Christmas Eve my dad gave me two rules: no gift-opening until the morning; and, if I got up before everyone else, I was not to disturb anyone, especially him.
I was the first to wake up the next morning. Although I dutifully did not wake my dad or anyone else, I did open all of the presents under the tree. It was Christmas morning, after all, and I was too young to read which ones were mine.
When the rest of the family came downstairs, they found me sitting in a pile of wrapping paper, ribbon, and gift tags. In front of me were all of the toys. Behind me were all the socks, shirts, and other boring items I’d discarded over my shoulder.
The situation was too comical for anyone to get angry. Still, some of the gifts had been mailed by faraway relatives or wrapped by people who couldn’t remember who was supposed to get what. I’m sure it was a puzzle to figure out their intended recipients. If anyone got the short end of the stick that Christmas, I hope it was me, the one who’d bungled it.
David Allan
Decatur, Georgia
In my early forties I was divorced with two young children. My boyfriend, who was a few years younger than me, was eager to start a family, and when he started talking about marriage and more kids, I decided to cut and run.
I broke things off just before a folk-dance festival we’d planned to attend together. We went separately, and I wandered the grounds feeling guilty but enjoying being free.
My ex cornered me and begged me to reconsider: we could go slow, or have an open relationship, or make it a sex-only arrangement. My answers were no, no, and definitely not.
“Do you want a potato pancake?” he asked, pointing to a food truck.
“Sure,” I said. Who doesn’t love a latke?
He walked off, and I waited, mad at myself for agreeing to his offer. I desperately wanted to disentangle my life from his, and I wasn’t even hungry. Plus he was taking forever. Where the hell was he?
From across the field a familiar-looking man—not my ex—approached. “Ron?” I said as he brushed by me.
We’d had a blind date a year earlier, but nothing had come of it. When I told him I was waiting for my ex to bring me a latke, Ron said he’d wait with me. I stopped moping, and we fell into an easy banter. I wanted to get to know this man who was willing to hang with me while I waited for another guy to bring me a potato pancake.
My ex never showed up. A week after the festival Ron and I started seeing each other. We said we wanted only companionship, no commitments—yet here we are, together, more than twenty-five years later. Every Hanukkah Ron gathers a mound of Yukon Golds and fries up a big batch of crispy latkes. They’re worth the wait.
Tina Lincer
Loudonville, New York
When I was in my early twenties, two friends came to visit me in Austin, Texas, for a ladies’ night out. We went to a bar downtown, and some guys we didn’t know gave us a round of “gummy bear” shots. We hadn’t heard of them before, but they tasted like the candy they were named for.
Within a few minutes the night started to slip away from me. I have only flashes of memory: standing on a barstool; yelling about a favorite song that was playing; arguing with a guy from Florida about whose state was better.
I woke up under a table just as the bar was closing. One of my shoes was broken. I stumbled through the bar, calling for my friends, but I couldn’t find them.
Out on the street a pedicab driver offered me a ride. I told him I couldn’t afford it, but he insisted. I let him take me partway, then gave him all I had in my pocket—two dollars—and jumped out.
After walking for a few minutes, I heard footsteps behind me and a man crying. I was still too incapacitated to be afraid, so I turned around and asked if he was OK. He said he was on his way to kill himself. He had the gun with him.
Shocked into alertness, I started a conversation, thinking I could talk him out of his plan. After I shared some personal stories I thought might change his mind, he told me he was going home, and we parted. I made it to my apartment and fell into bed.
The next morning I found out my friends had also lost their memories after the shots. Despite our suspicion that we had been drugged, we were safe. I hoped that man was too.
Lauren Oertel
Austin, Texas
When Dennis and I got married, I was thirty-six and in a hurry to start a family. Dennis’s mother, Irene, was thrilled that her fifty-year-old “baby boy” had finally tied the knot, and she loved the idea of another grandchild. It had been three decades since her last one. After a couple of years of unsuccessful attempts, Dennis and I resorted to in vitro fertilization. Irene offered financial help. She continued to give it through two failed rounds of IVF and Dennis’s growing weariness of our frequent-flyer status at the clinic.
The third IVF cycle worked, and I enjoyed a textbook pregnancy. Then my due date came and went. Irene began calling every other day to express her hopes that the baby would be born on her birthday, nearly two weeks away. I told her they would never let me go that long. Yet my obstetrician didn’t schedule an induction until I was ten days overdue. Fifty-six hours after arriving at the hospital, I had an emergency C-section, and Irene’s wish came true: Stephen, her first grandchild in thirty years, was born on her ninety-fourth birthday.
Selfishly, Dennis and I kept putting off a trip from our home in New York City to Irene’s assisted-living facility in Philadelphia. She had congestive heart failure, and we didn’t want to bring Stephen inside the facility’s hospital, where she’d been spending increasing amounts of time. Then, when the baby was five weeks old, she asked with uncharacteristic impatience, “When will you bring my grandson to me?” We drove to Pennsylvania the next day.
Smiling at Stephen from her hospital bed, Irene declared, “My life is complete. My baby boy has a baby boy.” We promised we’d visit again after she was discharged.
Days later she entered hospice care. We wanted to return, but a massive power outage struck much of the Northeast. That night, from the patio of our West Village apartment, we saw the stars over the city for the first time. On the brightest one I made a wish for Stephen.
When the power came back on the next afternoon, Dennis’s brother finally reached him with the news: their mother had passed away during the blackout. Though we were heartbroken, there was also something beautiful in the way it had occurred. We’ve told Stephen countless times about the night God turned out the lights so we could see his grandmother’s star.
Lisa Duchon
Austin, Texas
Fresh from earning my teaching credentials, I submitted job applications to multiple school districts. The HR person at one asked how I felt about sixth grade.
The start of the school year was one week away, and I didn’t have a single other job prospect. I would’ve taught seals to juggle.
“Sixth grade is definitely what I’m looking for,” I said, trying to sound experienced.
She told me there was an opening at the middle school, and she’d ask the principal, Joe, to call me. My phone rang within minutes.
“How soon can you be at my office?” Joe asked. I could tell he wanted my answer to be “Immediately,” so I threw on a button-down shirt and tie and raced to the school.
Joe welcomed me and asked me to tell him about myself. The truth was I’d chosen teaching because I’d found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to make it as a writer, a guitar builder, or a professional skateboarder. But instead I talked about my experiences interning for Outward Bound and teaching English in Japan. I said sixth grade had been an important time in my own development, and I wanted to help other kids at that age.
Joe asked if I’d mind coming with him to a meeting. “Sure,” I said, feeling anything but. He hadn’t commented on my story or asked a single follow-up question.
He ushered me to a large room where dozens of people were waiting, then introduced me to the group as “our new sixth-grade teacher.” As Joe described how I’d worked for Outward Bound, taught English in Japan, and had a special place in my heart for sixth grade, I waved awkwardly, unsure what was happening.
I didn’t know then that my first year of teaching would be one of the worst years of my life, or that the middle school would be so tough I’d be in therapy within three months. I was only aware that Joe needed me as much as I needed him.
Ty Sassaman
Minneapolis, Minnesota
When I went into labor with my second child in 1997, my husband and I left our six-year-old daughter with friends. At the hospital, seconds after my doctor told me to start pushing, the telephone in the delivery room rang, startling everyone. A nurse picked up, listened for a moment, then stretched the cord over my massive belly to give the phone to my husband. I saw his face contort. “Are they bringing her here?” he asked.
Our daughter had been bitten by a dog and was on her way to the ER. Wanting desperately to be in two places at once, I felt the adrenaline help me deliver a nine-pound baby with one final push. The nurses presented our newborn to my husband for a quick look before he raced off to be with her sister.
While I held my baby, I learned her older sister had been bitten on the head and face and would be treated by a renowned pediatric plastic surgeon who happened to be at the hospital for a conference. I decided a scared six-year-old needed to see her mother before she had an operation, so I began running around the floor, newborn in my arms and gown flapping open behind me, frantically trying to find someone to take the baby to the nursery. I got help just in time and was able to give my little girl a kiss as she was being rolled into surgery.
Hours later she arrived in my room with the top of her head covered by a bandage. I decided her bravery should be rewarded with the honor of naming her baby sister. To be sure we didn’t end up with “Posh Spice,” my husband and I gave her a list of options to choose from. She proudly announced her choice: Gina Francesca.
Vicki Dellacecca
Chicago, Illinois
In January of 1986, when I was fourteen, my mother decided to leave my father after thirty years of marriage. She planned to take my younger brother and me across the country to a friend’s house, where the three of us would begin a new life.
My father had always been an odd and angry man. He didn’t work, bathe, or brush his teeth, and his clothes were unwashed and flecked with cigarette burns. He ate mostly baby food and soft cookies. The previous summer he had broken his right arm punching our station wagon, just days after he had punched me for not walking quickly enough to the dinner table. Most frightening were his daily screaming matches with my mother. My father almost seemed to enjoy them.
I had cystic acne, a stutter, and chronic stomachaches that I now see as my father’s hostility made manifest in my body. My younger brother’s fourth-grade teacher had called him “the saddest boy I’ve ever known.” My mother would later write in her journal about this time, “We were running for our lives.”
Around 11:30 AM on January 28, after saying an uncomfortable goodbye to my father, my mother pulled onto the snow-covered highway with us in the back seat. She had just accelerated when I heard her gasp and saw an oncoming snowplow skidding into our lane. My mother veered right, but the plow caught the driver’s side of our car and spun us into a snowbank.
I opened my eyes to see the windows shattered and pieces of metal strewn across the road. We were miraculously unharmed, but the car was totaled, and the trip had to be postponed.
I remember hearing the television’s blare as we approached the front door of our house, and my stomach churned in anticipation of my father’s reaction to our return. We entered the living room and found him standing in front of the TV, watching a live news report. He was strangely still.
“What’s going on, Johnny?” my mother asked.
My father gestured at the screen and solemnly replied, “The shuttle blew up.”
Stunned, we listened to the newscaster explain that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded during liftoff, just minutes after our own accident.
David DeGennaro
Columbia Heights, Minnesota
Over coffee with a board member of the local green-burial committee, I ask if people can be buried in their own backyards. She says yes, if the property is large enough. My husband and I live on thirty-five acres, so we could do it. She gives me a packet of information, which I tuck away for the distant future.
Soon after, we see movement at the house on the plot next to ours, which has been empty for months. We walk over to welcome our new neighbors, an elderly couple named Francine and Ken. Francine tells us that Ken suffers from pulmonary fibrosis, and we insist they call us if they need anything.
The next day Francine texts: Help! Locked ourselves out. The nearest locksmith is fifty miles away, and there is an open window on their third floor. My husband and I walk the long road to their house, shouldering our tallest ladder. He climbs up, carefully opens the window screen, and enters.
Later we laugh with Francine about “breaking in,” but Ken is not amused. “Embarrassing,” he grumbles.
As thanks for the rescue, they have us over for dinner. Ken, as frail as he is, dresses up for the occasion—suit, tie, and shined shoes. By now he, too, is chuckling about our ladder escapade.
I want to reciprocate the dinner invitation, but Ken is too weak to come to our house. We decide to bring dinner to them instead: chicken in plum sauce and vanilla ice cream with huckleberries. Ken loves it. He suggests that we toast with his favorite drink, limoncello and vodka. “Here’s to good food and good neighbors,” he says.
We share more dinners over the summer and talk about teaching and saddle-making, geodesic domes and harvesting garlic. Each time we gather, Ken’s voice becomes fainter. By September his contribution to the conversation has diminished to almost nothing.
“Do you happen to know anything about green burials?” Francine asks me.
I give her the information packet.
On the last day of October I see a giant backhoe being delivered to our neighbors’ property, and I text Francine. Come over, she writes back.
Ken is lying in a hospital bed in the living room, his breathing irregular. Francine asks if he wants something to drink, and he nods. “Water?” No. “Juice?” No. “Limoncello?” Yes. He sips a few drops and smiles.
On November 5, after Ken has passed away, I help the women of the family wrap his body in a simple white shroud. We lay flowers atop his heart. The men carry the bier outside into the rolling hills of sagebrush and shale, and we lower Ken into the freshly dug hole.
Some evenings now Francine and I sit quietly on the couch in front of her bay window, savoring the view of the hills where Ken is buried. With a nod to him, we raise our glasses.
A.M.
Paonia, Colorado
My four-year-old daughter, Faith, has decided that she and I should go out on a date. So at noon on Saturday we climb into my truck to go to lunch and a movie. I click on the radio to listen to the Red Sox game while I drive.
“Daddy?” comes her voice from the back seat. “That man there is walking a dog. Can we get a dog?”
“We’ll see, princess,” I say, trying to catch the score.
“Daddy, guess what? My friend Mary has a dog. She’s going to bring it to school next week.”
“Really? That’s nice.” As Faith continues chattering about her class’s pet fish, I reach to turn up the radio. Fortunately I catch myself and realize what I’m doing: trying to drown out my daughter’s voice on our date. I shut off the game and do my best to make conversation. She gives me little opportunity to talk, but that’s OK. I’m fascinated by her observations and questions. Over lunch she fills me in on her favorite TV show, the boy she likes, and the presents she wants for her fifth birthday.
At the theater I dance her down the hallway, and then we settle in to watch Tangled, Disney’s retelling of Rapunzel. In true Disney fashion the heroine meets her true love, and the two of them face much adversity, occasionally interrupted by whimsical songs.
During a scene when Rapunzel sits in a boat gazing at her love, I catch a glimpse of Faith sitting straight up, her mouth open, enthralled by the romance on the screen. In my mind I see my little girl growing up. I see her riding the bus to school, playing soccer, and having sleepovers. I see her going to college. Getting a job. Meeting her own true love.
But that will happen another day. For now, I’m still the one who can scare the monsters away, the one who can lift her up, the one she wants to dance with.
Timothy Kenney
Coventry, Rhode Island
