For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home. She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to…
New York City is seventy degrees and sunny in late October, and on a bench outside the MET Cloisters Museum, my friend Sarah and I celebrate with a picnic. We sip coconut water, sop up hummus with pita, and savor the last dregs of summer. After a whole day in the museum, we cut through…
I’ve been noticing rocks everywhere I go—small or large, boulders or pebbles. My friend Thor began rock tumbling as a hobby while bored during the pandemic. He and his wife, Sara, moved temporarily into a small duplex while their dream house was being built on a bluff overlooking the Salish Sea, and polishing these rocks…
There is nothing particularly remarkable about a man my age having two artificial knees, except that everything about it is rather remarkable. Let’s start with the idea that a surgeon can take an electric saw, excavate the knee joint and portions of the adjacent femur and tibia, swap in a man-made hinge, re-wrap the existing…
When I left the house this morning, there was a ruckus in the grass, a rustling buzz, something digging under leaves. As I got closer and the buzzing intensified, I saw a cicada, pinned by a yellow and black, hard-shelled wasp. The cicada fought and shuddered and stilled. Then tried again to right itself. The…
I. I’m born at the end of the world. That is, geographically, in a small harbor town in southern California where the continent climaxes in a blaze of coastline, beyond it lying only the mirage-like remains of anarchipelago, the great gray curvature of the planet, and the sun whereit sets. My grandmother lives there too…
We had a garage sale yesterday to let some stuff go. It was like an Independence Day sale, or that’s what we called it, cuz my brothers said people buy more things for holidays. I put out my metal roller skates and old blue pogo stick and Big Wheel. It felt sad to give up…
We watch them watch us, a family of four, a tribe “in the world” but not “of it.” Our clothes are shirts-tucked-in-to-the-real-waistline and modest-the-dress and the hat-cannot-be-backwards. We shuffle and do not know how to stand when our parents ask for the grocery manager. Can you turn off the music while we shop? At the checkout counter,…
Charles Baxter recommends Question 7, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf, 2023). “A brilliant mix of memoir and both personal and social history, this book manages to say something new about the atom bomb, Leo Szilard, colonialism in Tasmania, and the author’s near-death experience, with all these strands braided together in a formal way that Sebald himself might have…
Summer 2021 - Digital