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One night when I was sixteen, my father got out of bed, went into the living room, and fell to the floor. He was a big man, and from my own bed I heard the noise and felt the house shake and heard my mother call out, “Roy! Roy! My word!”

Ghost Triangle

That winter, after Betse and I discovered we were infertile, I became fascinated by pearls. My passion for them resembled an addiction, though I hesitate to call it that. There was a ritual aspect to it, a heady anticipation, an urgency I didn’t always understand.

A Night On The Beach

To celebrate the arrival of the new year, Grace and I went to the south coast with our friend Pete. We stayed only a short walk from the beach, in a house that belonged to Andrew, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who had flown home for the holidays.

Acrostic

The prison van passed through the ratty grounds, by the crumbling remains of the 1820s cellblocks and a burnt-out station wagon. The afternoon’s thick heat had turned into a yellow evening haze. Bright razor wire had curled like Christmas tinsel along walls, culverts, corners of buildings, up power poles. The Hudson River glittered at the bottom of the hill. I’d been told the inmates were expecting a new teacher. I’d be “obvious” — my age and sex and suburban neatness all crowded into one word. The prison buildings sat stubborn, old, and impenetrable. I still hadn’t seen an inmate.

This Is The Way We Say Goodbye

The nurse leads me into the family waiting room, sits down on the couch beside me, and opens Mother’s chart. She says that Mother has congestive heart failure, a leaky valve in her heart, chronic lung disease, and osteoarthritis. In addition to this, the bone scan shows that the malignant melanoma on her back has metastasized into her pelvis, spine, and skull.

The Grace Of Great Things

Reclaiming The Sacred In Knowing, Teaching, And Learning

Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings. In education especially, community connects us with what Rilke called “the grace of great things.” We are, in reality, in community with the genes and ecosystems of biology, the great questions of philosophy and theology, the archetypes of literature, the artifacts of anthropology, the materials of engineering, the logic of systems and management, the shapes and colors of art, the patterns of history, the elusive idea of justice under the law — we are in community with all these great things. Great teaching is about knowing and feeling that community, and then drawing your students into it.

Conspiracy And Apocalypse At The McDonald’s In Goodland, Kansas

I left Encinitas, California, on April 1, 1997, with five hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills folded into the secret pocket of my jacket, and sixty dollars in my left-front pocket. I do this in case I get robbed. Spread your cash. If someone robs you, give him the smallest parcel. If the shithead persists, offer him the traveler’s checks. I have been robbed twice, once at knifepoint, once at gunpoint. No one ever wanted the traveler’s checks.

Memories Of Chengdu

At first I thought it was something in my head, like a dream you can’t shake during the day, or a memory of something that hasn’t happened. Something akin to madness, I reasoned. So I consulted a therapist.

Like A Leaf In Autumn

A Reconsideration Of The Good Death Of Scott Nearing

Although from the very beginning I noticed occasional inconsistencies in Helen’s account of Scott’s death, I assumed they were simply the internal equivalent of the way different witnesses remember different versions of an accident. Only, in Helen’s case, the versions differed over time, rather than from witness to witness.

Where Life Begins

This spring I am almost thirty-nine, the cut-off age for success with most infertility treatments. Under thirty, thirty to thirty-four, thirty-nine and under, forty and up — these age categories used to seem so arbitrary, but now the startling difference in success rates between the last two is a measure of how much hope I have left.