Absent-Minded Professor Joke: A famous mathematician works in the city at a university and lives with his family in the suburbs. One day they make a short move to a three-story, slate-gray Victorian house with red shutters the next street over, a move his wife oversees while he’s at work. He leaves his old house…
I must have been the oldest Jew in America who had never been to Israel. During the Six Day War, when I was eleven, I was determined to defend my people’s homeland. I doubted I would be able to take aim at an enemy who reminded me of my beloved Danny Thomas, the only Arab…
an excerpt from In a Foreign Country The map haunts you. You spotted it the day you arrived, hanging on the back of an office door. The words “Land Mine Areas, Bosnia-Herzegovina” are printed in large letters across the top, and each land mine area is labeled on it with a tiny, pale red dot….
I am not inclined to go off with strangers, yet here I am sitting outside a bar in Miradoux, a village in southwestern France, about to embark on a two-day journey along the Chemin, the Way, with Priscilla, a woman I met just days before. We will walk along a route called Le Puy, which…
There might have been other reasons Heather and I beat the hell out of each other when we performed in The Miracle Worker in the fall of 1984, but the best I could come up with was that she and I just weren’t able to fake it. Heather and I had been in a few…
The auditorium falls to a hush. The audience settles in their seats. Sun backlights the room through a wall of windows: this evening of summer solstice. The first reader walks to the podium. She is a novelist, and this novelist smiles at the room, a graceful and warm and kind smile, welcoming everyone and introducing…
Sometimes, after my daily dose of radiation, I would stop at a small bath store near the hospital to buy a bar of soap, perhaps, or a bottle of bath gel. I liked the little shop; it was holding its own among the retro hippie emporia of the neighborhood, no hint yet of tea tree…
I am in Dublin having dinner with an Irish man of whom I am quite fond. “Am I wrong in saying your family owned a sweet shop?” I ask him. “Well, it was more than a sweet shop. It was a place that made all sorts of candies and some small cakes and what you…
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