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Santa Paula

Fixing What’s Broken

A puddle of antifreeze, a porcelain doll, an extension cord

Hearts

You knew a boy who died of suicide. It was a mountain and he was playing chicken with friends, but he wanted to fall, he wanted to be the dead one. His parents said. You weren’t there.

At Seven

My own experience was going from grace to more grace. I felt only the love. All the other — the sin, the penitence, the being out of grace — was something my mother tacked on. That could never take root in me. The experience I’d had was so much more real and marvelous than anything I was supposed to believe.

Sally Mann’s Beautiful And Treacherous World

Only dead photographers receive the kind of attention Sally Mann’s been getting. When her exhibit of photographs, Immediate Family, opened at New York’s Houk-Friedman Gallery last year, Mann received reviews in the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker.

Sunbeams

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Secret

Driving back to Arlington across Key Bridge, I leaned my face against the cold glass window while my father bit off sentences like stalks of celery. I’m deeply, bitterly disappointed in you. Crunch. Do you know the risk you put me in? Crunch. What if you’d been kidnapped? Crunch. Who did you talk to? Crunch.

Family Genes

Chloe looked at Big Daddy, huddled and quivering in her grandmother’s lap. Big Daddy, once a plump, nervous, annoying Chihuahua, was now a frail, nervous, annoying Chihuahua. Every so often he would snort and wheeze and gag, like an aging coal miner.

Fathers And Daughters

A piano tuner, a sailor, an FBI agent

Race

The carpenters, The Supremes, the flowering vine planted at the base of a cross