Sparrow

Sparrow’s Guide To Business

When you walk on sand, you leave footprints. When you work, you leave “workprints.” The people who come behind you will judge you by your workprints.

A Guide To Home Acceptance

“Home improvement” always entails physically fixing up one’s house. But what about the emotional work of homeownership? One way to improve your home is through gratitude and acceptance. Does everything constantly need to be “fixed”?

On Time

Music is simply decorated time.

The Loss

Some treat shiva purely as a party. Some have a mournful air. Some look deeply into your eyes, and you can see that they have suffered, too. This is the higher purpose of suffering: to inspire deep-eyed compassion. It’s one of those truisms that is actually true.

Future Generations Will Thank Me

My Campaign (Sort Of) For President

The virus is revealing new facts about the U.S. Who would have guessed that People Who Resent Science Because It’s Too Darn Complicated would become a major political force?

Sparrow’s Guide To Meditation

Meditation teaches that change is constant. You fool yourself into believing that you are a fixed entity, but you are not. You are a river of transforming whims.

My Book Life

A book’s characters always wait for us. No matter what happens to me during the day, Kerouac remains exactly where he was yesterday. He never moves without my permission. I reanimate him at my whim.

Small Protest

The word fascist has lost all meaning. We need a new term to describe people who build detention camps for infants at the Texas border.

Goodbye, Patriarchy!

It’s like the French Revolution. One by one, prominent men are wheeled out to the guillotine and dispatched. Of course, the present-day “deaths” are metaphorical. Garrison Keillor is still alive, just out of sight. But “Garrison Keillor,” the charming, folksy, self-deprecating Midwestern humorist, is dead.

See You At The Impeachment

We may survive Trump, as we did Ronald Reagan, or we may not. My first goal, now that the election is over, is to renew my expired passport under the lame-duck Obama presidency. If Trump really is Mussolini, I may finally fulfill my longtime dream of living in coastal Sri Lanka.

The Art Of Aging

As you read this essay, you are aging. The older you get, the more you become an emissary from a vanished world — in my case, a world of black-and-white photographs taken by a Brownie camera, the sun bleaching the faces of the squinting subjects.

My Jets Cap

One day a woman on a subway platform called out to me, “Go, Jets!” while raising her fist. Puzzled, I looked behind me and saw no one. Then I remembered: I was wearing a Jets cap.