Writing on adventures both exotic and banal.
Most of the time, when I go to the grocery store, I think about Gorbachev. The Threat of Communism is something I vaguely remember, and the vision of a Soviet store where there is one kind of toothbrush (ugly, straight, and red) and one kind of bread (brown) has a firm place in my imagination. […]
Read More MoreI think when people say, “I want to be beautiful, and I want to be in love,” they are actually saying, “I want to be listened to.”
Read More The Sound of One Man WaitingSaturday I walked to lunch and back with my mother, under the parade of oak trees on her street. It had rained, on and off, stopping long enough for us to walk to the restaurant in the beating humidity that had set up camp. When we got back to the front door of her duplex, she pulled out her keys, and codaed our conversation: “Mothers just want everyone to be happy.”
Read More HappyIn March, I went to the computer to subscribe to the New Yorker, and found out one of my students had been shot. He was dead. I was having another one of my seizures of certainty that I could not be an educated person, a writer, a worthwhile human being, without subscribing to the New […]
Read More March to April
Going On 