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The Thousand-Peso Suit

Still, I love that line by poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.” But my wife is not familiar with Rilke, and solving our difficulties is not a matter of my explaining things to her. I’ve been doing that for three years, in two languages, and neither of us has changed.

Lessons In Dying

Nothing lives forever, but it seemed wrong that a child should have to face death. Death was for people who had lived their lives, tasted happiness, made mistakes, and had a chance to make amends; it was not for babies.

Airports

False-bottomed aerosol cans, the “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” a blue telephone-and-address book

Too Close For Comfort

A fifty-dollar bill every Christmas, the enveloping calm of crystalline snow and limitless sky, a blip on a monitor

Passover Questions

I feel defined by loss, my shape delineated by the absence of those who used to surround me. The invisible membrane of love that held us together for so many years has become stretched, attenuated by time and space and death. But when I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still feel my son and my mother.

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.

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?