While he was the governor of Leeds Prison, my uncle Bourke was late for breakfast twice. Usually he’d finished eating by quarter past eight, and by eight-thirty he was walking down the avenue of horse chestnuts which led from our front door to the main road; there he caught the No. 16 Wingate tram to…
The summer I was six, my parents rented an old gray-shingled house surrounded by tall hedges on a foggy, dissolving spur of Massachusetts shoreline, a house I still consider my most indelible home. We stayed there just three months, long enough for me to grow a quarter inch and to need new sneakers. One of…
My sister and I step briskly out of the greengrocer to get away from the men behind us in line who have told us, in great detail, what they’d like to do to us, where they intend to put certain parts of their bodies. The clerk, kindly, rings their purchases up slowly, so Cyndy and…
y wife and I are waiting for children. Every morning for three months, Joan’s alarm goes off at seven-even if she hasn’t climbed into bed until four or five-and she gropes the night table in the dark for her basal thermometer, slips it under her tongue, hits the snooze bar on her clock…
The other day I was wondering how to make onion soup, and my mind served up the bowl I had in Seattle just before we shipped out to Yokohama-my first onion soup, with a slice of toasted french bread and some melted Gruyere cheese. This was the end of 1946. I was six and a…
Greens Start simply. Lettuce green (light). Collard green (dark). Endive (deep thick white). Lettuce green (red at the curling edges). Lettuce green (with a spine of white). Mustard green (lace-spice). Cabbages, kales, and Brussels sprouts (yellow past their prime). And escarole (and oh . . .). Endive (the thick white). Greens are my delight. Swiss…
Plants & Houses (Northern Thailand) Several months after I come to live in the house, I begin to realize that nothing in the compound exists without effort or purpose. The lush, tangled gardens surrounding us serve as constant reminder that until only recently the neighborhood belonged to the encroaching forest. The house, a perfect cube…
In the practice of my trade, as writer and teacher, I lie by omission, I sometimes think, as much as I tell the truth. I note, for an eager, untalented first-year student, that her story is interesting, that it shows terrific energy, that there’s some marvelous insight here into waking up hungover on Saturday morning…
When my mother was a teenager, she kept scrapbooks on Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman. She pressed their photographs, magazine clips, and movie stills behind cellophane like dried flowers, and wrote them fan letters which they never answered. Recently, a boy I once baby-sat had “Guns ‘n’ Roses Lives” tattooed on his right shoulder blade….
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