I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her...
We were two women on either side of thirty throwing punches at one another’s faces in a concrete stairwell abuzz with florescent light. Our instructor showed us how to make a fist (thumbs on the outside), take aim, and put our weight into...
I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was...
In the face of all this time-distress, I try to keep foremost in mind that this world is full of beautiful and true things rather than reasons to watch the clock and become anxious, and one should be grateful rather than oppressed by...
We don’t exist in a soup of probabilities. We each carve a narrow path through the breadth of the possible—the sum of all choices we’ve made and all that were made for us.
The scene was picturesque: In the summer of 2021, the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself on the edge of a verdant cliff, where the forest hugged the sea. Here, in the Calanques, the clouds gliding across the sky appeared...
At the time of my brother’s first psychotic break, I knew nothing about ferns but that I had one and it was dying. I watched its seashell leaves wilt and drain. First they were jade, then chartreuse, then cream and sienna, like a stained...
