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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Brother’s Dinner With The President Of Sears
After this friend left, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I shut the door and fell to my knees, shaking and crying. I wished that my brother had been different. And I wished that I had been more forgiving and compassionate. I wished that everything between us had been different. I was on that floor for a while.
August 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Unknowing
Watching my wife, I have finally found the key to the map. I understand why men have spent millennia constructing systems to strip the power from this body: Look how she pulls her spine up to the sky. Look how effortlessly she strings herself between the ordinary and the divine.
July 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What Clouds
When I need to think, I clean. I sort and organize. I give away scores of possessions. In my mind I repeat the word away, away, away. I need clear, open space before I can even begin to understand the latest problem I’ve conjured for myself.
July 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Ghost Dogs
What happened next I shoveled into that dark ditch of my psyche, and then I covered it with heavy stones, and it wasn’t until more than twelve years had passed that I remembered what I’d made myself forget.
July 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
City Bus, Country Bus
In a bus, bumping elbows with messy humanity, I create memories that will bolster me for life. Our lives, as the author of Job reminds us, are short and full of trouble. The best we can do is connect, share a smile over this gift of existence.
June 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
What I Lived For
When I was young, I lived for what I thought of as “lyrical moments,” when the details of life were suddenly heightened and approached the transcendent. . . . Of course, if you live long enough, you start thinking more and more not about the lyrical but rather about time. . . . I am living to stay alive.
June 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Inheritance
I would like to give you a metaphor that describes what it’s like to potentially pass on to one’s children a pathogenic variant that will possibly go on to kill them, but everything I am coming up with is histrionic.
June 2021
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Surviving Documents
In the video he is an energetic storyteller relating episodes of great violence in a can-you-believe-it tone better suited to recounting a kooky incident out running errands. There is also the Yiddish tide of his syntax, which deposits nouns in unexpected places, like a rocking chair found sitting on the roof of a toolshed after a flood.
June 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Lovely Harry, Philip Larkin, And Me
At the end of our weekly sessions, as I’m about to walk out the door, I hand The Lovely Harry a manila envelope of poems I’ve written that week. Some weeks it’s a thin envelope; other weeks the pages inside push against the seams with their folded energy.
May 2021Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Bowl, Large Cloth, Pair Of Chopsticks
The air is still. The governor is on the radio: “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.” I start vacuuming. It’s not until Amy gets home an hour later that we begin to outline what needs to be done: We need cat carriers to transport the cats. We need provisions for the animals. We need our medications. I am demonstrating how much we need our medications.
May 2021
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