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The Back Door

Catching fireflies, caring for a newborn calf, hearing a slamming door for the first time

You Always Call On A Sunday

You are not ashamed. You are stunned: By this new thing that he left behind, that spread through you like blood in those hours he was with you. By how easy it is to die.

Narrow Escapes

A noodle shop in central Burma, The Phil Donahue Show, the Tet Offensive

The Maluksuk

Go-boy made a knife for his girlfriend. He called it an ulu, and I had never seen anything like it before. The ulu was an Eskimo fish-cutting knife. It was about the size and shape of the bill on a Lakers cap. When Go showed me how an ulu was used, he held its handle and carved up the air with card-dealing slashes. He said Eskimos never wasted any meat because of this knife.

Griswald

All you know is how sunny it was — so bright you could hardly see — and how the old man kept trying to tip you back into the stream, the water electric and cold, old Mr. Griswald saying not to worry, his hands on your shoulders, him standing in the water behind you, you this little kid, nine or ten years old, that voice of his strange and far above, saying not to worry, saying just lie back, saying he has you, he has you.

The Family Plot

The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find.

Mrs. Bernadette

Once, Mrs. Bernadette described the effect to me: “Have you ever seen a crow in flight, and you saw its feet pulled up under it as it rowed itself to wherever it was going? When I get the laughing gas, I feel like those helpless feet being carried along underneath that beautiful bird. It’s nice to let something else take over for a while. The world is too much with us.”

Leave The Light On

John Records On His Work With Homeless People

Anytime we see an adult who is homeless, we can think about the child they once were and what might have happened to them. Anytime we see somebody who is pushing a shopping cart and talking to themselves or apparently drunk on the sidewalk, we know they didn’t start out that way. They were once every bit as adorable as any other child; there was every bit as much hope in their eyes, every bit as much beauty in them as in our own children. Something happened to them, probably something awful, probably more than once, that broke them and brought them to their sorry state. They were once children who didn’t get a fair break. So let’s honor who they were. Let’s at least give them a fair break now.

What Is Left

I spent twelve years in the state penitentiary for crimes imagined by children and believed by adults. For those twelve years, my body became my enemy and my commodity — I let the inmates hurt me so I could live. Besides the common abuses, they also broke my fingers and thumbs and sometimes the little bones in my hands. Once, they shattered a wrist.