In the dim forest cabin, a brown bear stared at me. He sniffed my suitcase. I froze. The bear looked at me with his deep black eyes. We gazed at each other. No longer afraid of him, I felt a close connection. I watched as he explored the small, rustic room, pawing at the door…
We use them every day. Across intersections, white stripes stitch together seams of foot traffic. The ubiquitous stripes signal pedestrian paths that network our built environments. Often called “crosswalks,” these pedestrian crossings have evolved over the years to curiously accrue animal names like zebra crossings, panda crossings, pelican crossings, toucan crossings, and puffin crossings. To…
They come arching over the horizon from distant places, like bent, crooked arrows dispatched from many directions. They arrive in thin blue envelopes on folded stationery, or in fat, feverishly duct-taped packages. By overnight mail—sent prepaid by Fed Ex—($26.00!)—containing, say, three little misshapen onyx pebbles, which, I am told, should be placed in the corner…
When my parents died, I inherited all of their photographs and papers as they had inherited their parents’ photographs and papers and so on back a few generations. Things came to me chaotically: in old shoe boxes and albums and scrapbooks, in envelopes and baskets and shopping bags, in emptied kitchen drawers. This summer, I’ve…
Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it. — Home, Marilynne Robinson 2. Genesis: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 3. My father is…
Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts…
A self consists primarily of unremembered events. The highest number of memories forgotten about a particular person will disappear from the mind of that same person. Usually this happens involuntarily, but some people suppress certain memories. Occurrences tangential to the person tend to retain even less staying power. Many of the moments relating to the…
A plane crashed under mysterious circumstances in a country with a dense and sparsely populated rainforest. None of the passengers or crew survived. Because of the nature of the accident, many parts of the plane had scattered over a wide area, which made what would prove a difficult investigation almost impossible. People from nearby villages…
My high-school English teacher Ms. Dachs did three things I remember my senior year: she cried openly in front of the class on September 12, 2001; she introduced us to William Safire’s column “On Language”; and she played a cassette tape of George Carlin’s stand-up bit on euphemisms. That’s all I have of her. (What…
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