When I was young, I was in the habit of lying in bed in the falling night. I was waiting. When I would rise from the bed, my body stayed behind. This room of my childhood was no different from any other room, in any other house, in any other place. My bed rested […]
I responded to two e-mails today from young men who were looking for some life guidance. After the appropriate preambles, I wrote exactly the same thing to both. Here are three questions to ask yourself: What personal skills and personal attributes do I possess that will cause people to give me money? What kind of things […]
I take Adderal. I didn’t used to. I’m writing an essay about it — the working title is Understanding My Stupid. The thing about writing an essay is that you have to tease out the sense in things that are loosely connected in your head. Sometimes the essay peters out because the things that you […]
Sitting in the second story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daughter Becky something about living. She’s laid up with a broken foot that’s keeping her from working at the micro-distillery where she found a job after coming back from Louisiana, […]
I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. ~George Robert Gissing The first time I read Flannery O’Connor I had to pause, go back and read paragraphs again, because the vividness of her world had […]
We drove from Granite Springs to Stamford in the middle of the night. You were born in the midst of drama and fanfare. I held you in the hospital room, fell in love with you and have loved you ever since. I had to go home to walk McDougal. I drove back in the middle […]
She’s young here, not yet 20, and her future isn’t written in her face. She’s experienced sadness. Her father died when she was young and her family was reduced to a mean existence, the froth and frivolity of a town life erased by the shadows of tenement rooms. But she’s smart, pretty and determined. She’ll continue […]
A human being is part of a whole…[but] he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest…This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison […]
On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The seasons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have been […]
These young men are waving goodbye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pittsburg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Mountains, pass into Tennessee and pick up the Jackson Military Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mississippi Delta and the bayous and great swamps surrounding New Orleans. They are following […]