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All The Hours And None Of The Words

My father returned to the table, his lips clamped tightly shut and his brow furrowed. “That was the union rep,” he said. My dad swallowed hard, then continued: “Carl accidentally ran over one of the twins last night with the mower. She’s dead.”

Lessons From Basra

I work in the library of a low-income public school. I can see the kids are interested in war. The boys check out all the books about World War I, World War II, weapons, spies, codes, guns, castles, and knights. Boys without fathers are especially interested in combat.

A Year Like Any Other

How long will it be, after you die, before the last living person who knew you also dies? And when there is no one left living who remembers you, what will your life mean then, after all of the noise?

Seeking Evil, Finding Only Good

The justice system is so capricious that if you were to read all of my case files and try to guess which defendants got death sentences, you could never do it based on the facts.

The Immigrant’s Bed

For twenty-five years I lived an unsettled life in a city abandoned by history. Successively occupied by the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Germans, and the Soviets, Bucharest was slowly transformed from a cosmopolitan Romanian capital (the “other Paris,” it was nicknamed in the 1900s) into a Stalinist Disneyland.

501 Minutes To Christ

Outside of a psychotic who attacked me a few months ago (I stuck his head into a snowbank until he promised to leave me alone) and a middle-aged fellow who drives around town shouting obscenities from a riding mower, there is not much happening here in Middlebury, Vermont.

Captive Audience

Confessions Of A Book Junkie

Here in this high-desert penal colony, boredom is king, and although prison is not nearly as harrowing as it is made out to be in the media, simple pleasures are in short supply. Under these diminished circumstances, passing the time with a good book takes on new meaning. Books are cherished, hoarded, reread, traded, borrowed, begged for, and accumulated in any way possible.

Captain

Like Sherman, I have burned Atlanta. Or maybe Atlanta has burned me. Either way, I’ve been blackballed from every bar I ever frequented, and it took only a dozen years. Now I find myself married with child, sober, and moving on. My wife, pregnant again, wants to live in the heartland, Kansas City, where her family waits and I can stroll the streets in recovery without people whispering.

The Moral Equivalent Of Wildness

I drifted in my kayak, listening for small sloshes and hushed voices behind me: the sounds of my college students launching their boats in the dark. The night was intensely quiet and dark, like a campsite after the fire goes cold, but the moon was preparing to rise over the mountains in the east, and the lake showed a slick of silver.