It turned out there was another mother at my son’s nursery school whose father had killed himself. I learned this when I came back to Boston, ten days after my father died. I dropped my son off at the school and watched as he darted off, quick as a released minnow, into the space that…
The Sharma family’s trip to Bombay didn’t go well. The Royal Nepal Airlines plane started acting funny after half an hour—a strange sound choked the left wing, and the plane began to hiccup—so they had to land in Patna, where the passengers were forced to stay in a hotel for the night. The mishap would…
At the very northern edge of the Soviet Union, just west of the Kara Sea, there’s a city called Dickson, which is exactly the spot I used to focus on on the map on my bedroom wall when I was trying to fall asleep. By the time I was twelve the map had been moved…
Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…
In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….
When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…
Or: The Story Behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival The church is quiet except for the nun’s approaching footsteps. You could imagine the sound of the soft soles of her shoes scuffing down the center aisle, coming towards the last pew, barely growing louder as…
Every village has its rhythm, and every year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out, and the families of Phillies…
Hank says: "Pan Am is run by the CIA, you know." He says: "There’s trouble brewing here. Out there." He points with his chin. "In the sugar cane fields. In the jungle." He says: "Hemingway knows. He knows all about it." Clara says nothing. She is thinking that she can’t even get this one thing…
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