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Family and Relationships
His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
December 2023
This Little Bit I Am Trying To Hold
Poems About Departures
Listen to the poets in this month’s special poetry section read their poems about leaving and letting go. To listen, click the play button below each title in the article.
I will leave you, / and I will / leave the sudden // darkness of afternoon thunderstorms / and I will leave / the rain and its patience in shaping mountains
— from “I Will Leave,” by Michael Bazzett
I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit. Something that can be held. To bring / it up to your lips the way I spooned strawberry / yogurt up to his and said to him the word “Eat.” / There was no use, in the end. There was no hunger.
— from “I Did What I Could to Keep This,” by Peter Markus
Tonight, because all matter is dissolving, you & I / are being gradually undressed by the universe — // silk & wool molecules mingling with cells / rising from skin like souls
— from “Everything,” by Terry Lucas
December 2023This Month In Sun History
Our 50th Year Of Publication
The most important December in Sun history is, well, this one: the month in which Sy Safransky, after fifty years of laboring to put out the magazine he founded, steps away from his desk and becomes, deservingly, editor emeritus.
December 2023
Become A Friend Of The Sun
Every person around us contains a whole universe. The Sun has always seemed to me like a place where we throw a bunch of universes together and see what happens. . . . If you value the way The Sun brings a variety of voices to your ear — some candid, some cajoling, some joyous, and all of them looking you in the eye and telling the capital-T Truth — then I hope you’ll consider making a donation and becoming A Friend of The Sun. Any amount you give helps bring us together in the magazine’s pages month after month.
December 2023Deformation Catalog
I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.
December 2023
Gratitude
A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop
December 2023
20, 40, 60, 80
Middle-aged people shrink, crease, fade, and, if they’re lucky, slowly lose the desire to be noticed, the way we once lost our childhood taste for Necco Wafers or Pez. My desire to be seen is gradually being replaced by the desire to see: the faces of those I love, the cardinal in the bush, the socks of the woman with multiple sclerosis who swims at the Y.
December 2023
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
December 2023
Sunbeams
The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006
December 2023
The Nail Salon
Some people remember childhood bike rides and ice-cream sundaes; I remember acetone and moon-slivers of nails.
November 2023
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