I was rolling jeans into tubular bundles and tucking them into my suitcase, packing for Prague. This trip would be the longest that I’d been away from the kids, and also the farthest. “Don’t worry about us,” my husband said. “OK,” I said. “We’ll be fine,” he continued, sensing my anxiety. He handed me an…
“These cliffs must have many secrets.” It is a sentence that has floated, fully formed, in and out of my thoughts since I arrived in Ireland. Now I say the words aloud for the first time. Breda Roche’s expression sharpens. “That, they do.” Her gaze on the winding street ahead of our car is grave….
Childhood is self-enclosed and timeless. In adolescence, a moment comes when we sense the future, if only vaguely and ecstatically. For me, that happened on a boarding school trip to Quebec. It was 1962 and I was fourteen. The circumstances of the excursion have gotten fuzzy in my memory, but I do know we traveled…
Ace in the Hole The first Minuteman Missile—America’s first solid fuel, fully automated, push-button missile and John F. Kennedy’s secret weapon against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis—was buried in Alpha Six silo, forty miles southeast of my hometown. It took only thirty-two seconds to launch. In 1962, when Khrushchev’s threats escalated, Air Command…
ba·ja·da noun 1: a steep curved descending road or trail 2: an alluvial plain formed at the base of a mountain by the coalescing of several alluvial fans Origin 1865-70, Americanism: from the Spanish feminine past participle of bajar: to descend December 20 Santiago quit the academy yesterday. We were on our way into town…
The town where you grew up—the place you’ll always think of as home—has three stoplights, a grocery store, a twin cinema, a post office, two dozen churches, three banks, a hospital, a handful of gas stations, and three factories that produce custom wood furniture, Lee jeans, and outboard motors. There’s a main street where teenagers…
In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of…
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…
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