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Telling The Truth

Library books, a stage production of Cheaper by the Dozen, bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches

The Hereafter

For someone who’s been to New Jersey only a handful of times, I have a long history with the Garden State. I’m visiting it now because my Aunt Velma is dying. The cancer’s giving us just enough time to say goodbye.

My Grandmother’s Autobiography

I can understand my mother’s revulsion. My grandmother writes of the time she left my mother and her brother in a boardinghouse for six weeks while she was in the hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. My mother was nine; her brother was five.

Sunbeams

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

George Orwell

Instead Of Dying

The leopard of his imagination pulled down the feathers and blooded flesh of stories fueled by his previous failures and delivered as the result of his recovery. Whereas earlier he’d simply chronicled the deterioration of mostly working-class lives, his new stories actually allowed for recovery and revelation.

Sweet Rolls And Vodka

At sunrise you climbed through your bedroom window at the recovery home and found a note waiting on your untouched pillow: “This was your final warning. Pack today.”

Paradise Found

Christ embodied and lived the sum total of what I’ve learned in life, which is that the truth about things is hidden, it is small, and it is scorned and mocked by the world. Out of this poverty and want, this failure and humiliation, he created a temple “not made by human hands” to fulfill the deepest desire of every human heart, which is not to be so eternally, everlastingly alone.

Tilth

A friend at her father’s funeral had warned her, “When grief comes, ride it like a wave, like a childbirth contraction, even though it might feel like it’s pulling you down to the bottom. If you don’t, you’ll pay the price later. And don’t expect anyone to do it for you.”

Three Short Essays

Driving across America the August before I stopped drinking, I found myself in Tennessee, taking note of that big look that trees get in the East at the end of summer: a line of them at the far end of a field, like blooms of dark green ink dropped into water.