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…
I sometimes encounter ex–baseball fans (invariably middle-aged men) who tell me they have given up following the sport because of the steroid scandal, the huge salaries of the players, the duplicity of the owners—“It’s all become just a big business,” or some such explanation, which they deliver in a tone of principled disgust. I listen…
I thought I’d grow up to be a scientist. As a child I was infatuated with pet mice and guppies and studying trees from the shapes of their leaves. And don’t I remember, as a kindergartner, being ushered into the school basement to watch on TV the Russian satellite, Sputnik, soaring into outer space? We…
In Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” you end up in a classroom where everything dies. The orange trees, the snakes, the tropical fish, the salamanders, the puppy, the Korean orphan, the grandparents, the parents, even some of the students. In just two pages, the story has the momentum of a howitzer, piling the bodies up in…
From my diary, April 22, 1994: …came home to the news that Richard Nixon, a man who let me down again and again, and to whom I felt deeply connected—whether I was wearing a Nixon-Lodge button at the age of 9, or having a shouting match with my father over the Cambodian invasion ten years…
At the beginning of the third book of the Odyssey, Telemachus’ ship pulls into the harbor of sandy Pylos, as the morning light burnishes the sea. Homer tells us: The sun rose from the still, beautiful water Into the bronze sky, to shine upon the gods And upon men who die on the life-giving earth….
Many years ago, I decided to make an adventure movie about my family that had nothing to do with me. The family would live in the trees and swing from room to room making the leaves whistle, making the birds flustered. They would live there all year round, even in the snow, and when it…
We thought we were onto something new. We loved doing it in the out-of-doors, thought ourselves pioneers: the first to sneak off into the darkness, unzip the fly, to feel a breeze on the back of our necks, to open our mouths, our hearts, his heart. We were partial to certain places: the park, the…
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