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Sunbeams

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of our selves.

Victor Hugo

Anniversary

I learned many things from my parents. They taught me the subjectivity of truth; they made it impossible for me to arrive at a single, definitive version of any story. They showed me the traps minds make for themselves, and how the early wounds can calcify and warp, weaken and deform the eager, ardent child brides and grooms in all of us.

Wide-Eyed In The Gaudy Shop

At a backyard barbecue under the tangled mesquite trees around his run-down but peaceable home, Victor, one of my fellow English-as-a-second-language teachers at the Instituto de Inglés, insists that there is nothing in the States for me, no reason for me to return.

Father And Son

This was before autism was in the news, before one out of every 166 babies born in America was being diagnosed with some form of it. The movie Rain Man was my only point of reference.

One Cigarette A Day

We are bouncing over a rough ocean, on a boat packed with twenty or so fishermen, and I am breathing the smoke from my grandfather’s cigarettes. In the darkness of early morning the captain collects money for a gambling pool. “First and heaviest, thirty-seventy split,” he yells, and when he gets to us, my grandfather hands over a fistful of bills. As the captain moves on, my grandfather winks at me and says, “You will win.”

Instead Of Dying

The leopard of his imagination pulled down the feathers and blooded flesh of stories fueled by his previous failures and delivered as the result of his recovery. Whereas earlier he’d simply chronicled the deterioration of mostly working-class lives, his new stories actually allowed for recovery and revelation.

Sunbeams

Men are stupid and women are crazy. And the reason women are so crazy is because men are so stupid.

George Carlin

The Marriage Bed

You will have to take my word on this: we loved each other. We were married to other people, we fell in love, and finally we were together and then married, for thirty years. We both expected Bill to die first; I was twenty-seven years old and he was fifty-four when we met, and through all of those years, even from the beginning, I told myself that I could live with his absence because our love would carry me the way a wave carries the light of the sun.