Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I used one of them as the title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the…
One Friday night, the winter I was twelve, my mom’s brother, Tío Erwin, showed up at my grandmother’s apartment in Jamaica Plain with his new wife. She was fifteen. They’d met during his recent trip to Guatemala. She looked like any one of my cousins, only she didn’t weigh as much. Her smile stretched, revealing…
I’m staring at a rush of players on the screen—fragments of knees and shoulders, a collision of helmets—when the two aides in front of me leap from their seats and yell, “Go go go,” as if they’re rallying with fans under a blue dome of sky rather than with patients in pajamas and robes in…
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…
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…
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…
I enter my name into a search engine. There are 3,700 results. The word torture appears in most of them. I read the blogs. I read the comments that follow. I find more blogs. I pretend those don’t bother me either. I check e-mail, thirty-eight new messages. Mr. Fair, I’m not at all sure why…
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