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It started last spring: this nagging worry I might be failing my eldest child by not enrolling him in enough activities. At the time, he was fencing once a week, and playing baseball on Saturdays, at least when it wasn’t raining too hard, and this seemed like enough, especially as the fencing was something he
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Here was a night, mid-May, that dropped into the thirties. The pregnant wren had endured a week of blustery rain; the mudroom, in these conditions, gets no light at all. I was sorry for her, and then, once her chicks were born, anxious. A newborn carolina wren is a goofy, fragile thing – goofy and
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The highway leading out of Mexico City to the pyramids at Teotihuacan is eight lanes, four to a side, that wrap around the subway and then the railroad and are braced by inner and then outer city buses. The peseros run on diesel, still, and are both charming – boxy and enameled in cream and
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Great Expectations reads like a memoir; it has the memoirist’s capricious elisions and divulgences; because it is written from a distance, elements that might, in a novel, serve as key plot points (eg: becoming a father at nineteen) are bulleted; we get a different coming of age: the dawn of a critic, ambivalently participating in…
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I come home from New York ravenous. Nine forty five at night, that backlit dark of mid autumn, with it tremulous hunter’s moon. I hear soft music and O’s high, piping voice – she is in her bed, curled against my mother, looking at photographs of herself. Only when she is very tired will she
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A thin strip of sand-edged road, fast eroding, separates the Vineyard Sound from a large salt pond the Wapanoaug named Sengekontacket, place where the brook flows. Here, the cormorants scritch scritch from the opposite bank, and a flock of blue-white gulls rear up in a wild, undulating fracas, but the water is still and temperate,
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The sky and sea were the same color, lapis shot through with malamute steel, an open mouth with a hangnail moon under which I mostly drifted, though occasionally I stood to get the full, battering force of the incoming tide. Yards away, my friend was chanting up at the sky, “flourish,”relish,” some pleasant, sybillant incantation
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“Did any of you happen to see –” desperately, he wracked his brain for an op-ed or headline relevant to order forms. “To see–” he repeated. Wing it. “What happened to the bond market this morning?” The maybe engineer’s eyes were trained on Jamie’s, and he smiled at her. “Something very unusual occurred,” he said.…
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One Monday evening before the clocks change, I fly to Florence to attend the wedding of an old college friend. I’d arranged everything at the very last minute, and travel alone and somewhat circuitously, leaving Boston just before midnight on a Monday and arriving in Florence some eighteen hours later. None of this is interesting…
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My sister is in an art cult whose focus is on forms of attention that are resistant to capitalism. My sister is not a working artist, exactly; perhaps she is no longer a member; perhaps membership is for life, or at least a stage of it, like a real cult. We were walking together through the…
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