I’m an old man-not as old as Robert Frank was when I last saw him, but old. And now that I’m old, most every night an overflow of memories, doubts, regrets, images, and yearnings chew at my brain and keep me from sleeping. Still, come...
Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— different than locking a door, or the shutdown we invented at the start of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks swept quickly between us, a sign designed especially for school.
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.
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...
Among tall silver birches. Dogs yipping beyond the timberline. In my bag, a clementine for us to split. The river’s image trembles as you dip your foot in, raking the pebbles back and forth till silt rises to the surface.
