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Fading Away

The instant Fritz sees her at Keith Gentile’s party, it clicks: Claire Raffo. The pitiful little girl he knew way back at Saints Peter and Paul grade school, who sobbed herself sick every day over lunch while the gorgeous Sister Hyacinth smiled and banged the table with her yardstick and drilled Claire in her lovely soprano to eat.

Slides

In 1955, when I was nine years old and my sister was ten, my father bought his first 35 mm camera with money he didn’t have and dragged us and my mother on a cross-country trip for the opening of Disneyland. He went crazy taking pictures of us standing at the edge of cliffs, holding snakes, showing scrapes and bruises, and pretending to be happy.

Bang, Bang, In A Boy Voice

In 1984, the year vigilante Bernhard Goetz shot four black boys on a New York City subway car, I was nine, and I loved to ride the subway by myself. The dingy trains were spectacular space rockets to me. When I rode them, I wasn’t just going to Queens to visit my grandmother; I was saving the galaxy.

The Kitchen Table: An Honest Orgy

The poem is called “The Table,” written by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade and translated by Elizabeth Bishop. My copy is underlined. When had I inked up the pages, taking note of this line: “Around the wide table . . . It was an honest orgy / ending in revelations”? No words I might struggle to string together this morning will resonate more, and no other object we own tells a story quite the way that kitchen table does.

The Bedroom

A piano bench, creaky beds, a carving of a swan’s neck and head

Cuba Libre

Halfway through the first day, we passed an army caravan. Father said they were going to the Sierra Maestra mountains to kill Fidel Castro, “the enemy of Fulgencio Batista and General Motors.” I knew nothing then about Batista’s dictatorship and Castro’s attempts to overthrow it.

Nature-Deficit Disorder?

Richard Louv Asks Whether We’re Raising Our Children Under House Arrest

So though our fears and restrictions arise from the best intentions, we have to ask what effect they are having on the health of children, and on the earth itself. Environmentalists and conservationists, almost to a person, had some transcendent experience in nature when they were kids. If we take that opportunity away from today’s kids, who will be the future stewards of the earth?

Help

A black Labrador, the Beatles, skinny-dipping

Incredible Hulk Saving Souls

My father thought men who talked about being “saved” were weak, even feminine. Religion was the domain of women; he was too busy farming and working at the ceiling-tile factory to concern himself with salvation. My mother prayed and talked to me about God behind his back.