It’s the heart of our kitchen — an ordinary table, made of sturdy pine boards, solidly joined, built to last. Though it’s scarred and scratched, Norma says she likes it that way; she wants to read our history on it, the way you read the lines on someone’s face.

Something was drastically wrong with my lungs: every night, they made sounds like a basketful of squealing kittens. I was always coughing, had pains under the sternum, and could not push a car or even run up a flight of stairs without gasping like an old melodeon full of holes. This condition came on slowly; no single daily or weekly change was ever big enough to scare me out of my habits. For three years after noticing these symptoms, I continued smoking pot.

There is a hospital in Haiti, on the edge of the Artibonite valley. If you walk up in the hills behind it, past the painted mud huts roofed with palm fronds, past the goats flapping their ears, and the laughing little boys, up the rocky paths through the sugar cane, and you look back into the valley, you will not see the hospital, only the water tower rising above the trees. Beyond the trees, rice paddies glow brilliant green in the sun, lined with irrigation ditches and coconut palms. Then, bending and twisting through the valley like a series of lakes and flood plains, flows the Artibonite itself. In the distance rises the Massif des Montagnes Noires, and away to the west lies the blue Atlantic. There are no cars, no power lines, no billboards, no smog. No airplanes or traffic break the silence, only the occasional bleating of a goat or crowing of a rooster. From a distance it is paradise. Up close it is not.

The things I did during childhood do not seem as important to me as the overall mystery of existence. I went from one thing to another, as the Buddhists say, like a drunken monkey. Toys, games, junk food — this is what we are raised on in the West, and in much of the world it is considered the acme, and worth re-writing history for.