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Physical Health
Yahrzeit
And every year thereafter on the anniversary of Michael’s death, Hal places a call to me to talk about Michael. A commemoration, this. In Judaism, the anniversary of a loved one’s death — called yahrzeit — is carefully noted with rituals: visits to the cemetery, a consciousness through prayer, and, most notably, a candle lit which burns for the twenty-four-hour day, its light and shadow a reminder of loss and life’s continuity.
July 2002
We Decided To Call It Baseball
The day after my mother told him the news, he called. His voice cracked, and I could hear him trying to pick up his words and hand them to me, one by one. “Are you all right?” he asked, over and over. It wasn’t so much what he said as what I heard in his voice: I heard somebody I’d never met before, a man he didn’t even know so well himself.
April 2002Quills
My companion, Amelia, had a clear view of the whole incident. It went like this: It was 6 P.M. on a Friday, and we both wanted to finish stripping the doors of this old farmhouse before dinner. With a lot of little bedrooms, we had a lot of doors to strip.
April 2002Six Henry Stories
In Henry I’d met a man with no sense of proprietorship in the presence of true words. In one sense I’d been, as I said, a mere parrot, but in another sense I’d plucked Henry’s insight off the radio and taken it to heart. Henry honored this second capture as the solo philosophical event it was. He was loving a neighbor’s insight as one loves one’s own. He was being a father whose nondogmatic stance let grace flow in an adoptive son.
March 2002
Roundup
His name was Tom Howard, and he hit my brother so hard that he broke both his cheekbones and shattered his nose, all with one punch. My brother was not yet thirty, but he was already on a decline that Tom Howard’s blow surely hastened.
March 2002
The Rivers We Call Ourselves
At every step, the brook changes; it becomes deep or shallow, wide or narrow, silent and frozen or splashing over logs and stones. I see now that we are like that water, carving our experience into life’s terrain.
October 2001Visiting Ruth
My mother, Ruth, is a flower closing. Her belly button is the center, the point around which the collapse occurs, limbs drawing in. Her shoulders are compressed forward. There is the hump of her upper back. The matching curl of her knees when she sits in her wheelchair or lies on her side in bed. The pale feet, which she cannot move. At the center of her body, death is pulling on a cord, gathering her in and down.
October 2001Staying Awake
A still birth, a recipe for orange duck, a young professional pianist
February 2001
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