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Sunbeams

From infancy I was surrounded by music. . . . To hear my father play the piano was an ecstasy for me. When I was two or three, I would sit on the floor beside him as he played, and I would press my head against the piano in order to absorb the sound more completely. . . . When I was eleven years old, I heard the cello played for the first time. . . . When the first composition ended, I told my father, “Father, that is the most wonderful instrument I have ever heard. That is what I want to play.”

Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows

Scavenger’s Run

In Guangzhou, China, I once saw two men row through the muddy waters of the Pearl River to pick up floating leaves of cabbage. Now, a few years later, that’s what I do: make the scavenger’s run.

Class Struggles In Sweet Cider

This is the part where Karen Wheeler jumped in and turned the world around, whether because Karen Wheeler is one fine bowler herself and enjoys as much as anybody kicking the butts of the folks over in Greensboro, or whether, as I’ve said, her heart has spots soft for Gus, I don’t know.

Caleb’s Journal

I live alone. Other men might be lonely. But who can notice what might be absent when other things are present?

Living In Lotus

Ever since the therapist said, “Rebecca, if only you’d let go once in a while, relax, flow, you’d be a lot happier,” I’d been trying to write in the lotus position.

Bearing Up In Winter

She begins to go through the store’s canceled checks, bank statements, and copies of federal employer’s quarterly tax returns, which I do not have enough of, according to the records in the file that Dolores has brought with her.

After The Fire

Howie got his guitar the day the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and he named it Elijah. It made a big impression on him: there he was in his living room tuning this new, magic thing, watching the tanks roll into Prague on television.

On Our Fifteenth Anniversary

Someone asked me recently how I raised the money — or, as he put it, the venture capital — to start The Sun. I told him it was easy: I borrowed fifty dollars from a friend.

Mister Duck

He is a Southern suburban white boy now all grown-up, born too late for Vietnam and not late enough for high-yield T-bills, so he is stuck somewhere, an underground movement of one. That suits him fine.

A Night Swim

Phillip Fanno was playing with his food. He gave his pork chop a mashed potato beard and moustache, a julienned-carrot nose and mouth, and, not finding suitable eyes on his plate, cast about the table for them.