Browse Topics

Saying Too Much

A sugar daddy, hors d’oeuvre, citizenship

Elson Habib, Playing White, Ponders His First Move

He considers opening with the queen’s pawn, remembering his grandfather’s advice: Open with a central pawn, Elson. It does not matter which. Cease your pawns after two or at most three moves. Bring knights into action before bishops. Bishops are sly and should be held in reserve. They are not to be fully trusted.

Authority

Taking violin lessons, requesting conscientious-objector status, protesting at the state capitol

Not Suitable For Children

She looked as though she’d been jolted by electricity, her beautiful brown eyes alive with surging energy but puffy and gray underneath. At times her zest to complete tasks frightened my brothers and sisters and me, and I’d hide from her, even though I liked to help her cut out pictures for collages.

Fights

Water balloons, an underground fort, the letter c

Guidelines For Mountain-Lion Safety

I was five years old the first time I saw the total interconnected harmonic clockwork of the cosmos, and it happened again when I was seven or eight, and possibly once more when I was reading the great philosophers and experimenting with hallucinogens in my late teens.

Sunbeams

Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Carolina Mill, 1932

In the spring of 1932, when I was twelve years old — the last year of my childhood, as I understood it — my grandfather left the farm and came to live with us. His wife, my mother’s mother, had just died, and he could no longer get loans to keep the farm going. My father had already given up farming a few years earlier, and we were living in the village outside the Bell cotton mill.

Rites Of Passage

Being laid off, going deer hunting, getting a divorce