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Family and Relationships
Abandon All Expectations
The fish is now thrashing at the surface. Unlike every other captain I have seen, Cuervo uses a net, not a gaff, to bring it aboard. He has enough experience to know that, by the time a full-grown yellowtail is brought to the boat, it has essentially fought itself to death. Rich lets the captain take over, and Cuervo handles the marvelous creature with a tenderness that has been missing from most of my charter-fishing experiences.
December 2023
This Little Bit I Am Trying To Hold
Poems About Departures
Listen to the poets in this month’s special poetry section read their poems about leaving and letting go. To listen, click the play button below each title in the article.
I will leave you, / and I will / leave the sudden // darkness of afternoon thunderstorms / and I will leave / the rain and its patience in shaping mountains
— from “I Will Leave,” by Michael Bazzett
I am here to translate my father’s death / into fruit. Something that can be held. To bring / it up to your lips the way I spooned strawberry / yogurt up to his and said to him the word “Eat.” / There was no use, in the end. There was no hunger.
— from “I Did What I Could to Keep This,” by Peter Markus
Tonight, because all matter is dissolving, you & I / are being gradually undressed by the universe — // silk & wool molecules mingling with cells / rising from skin like souls
— from “Everything,” by Terry Lucas
November 2023His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
November 2023
Become A Friend Of The Sun
Every person around us contains a whole universe. The Sun has always seemed to me like a place where we throw a bunch of universes together and see what happens. . . . If you value the way The Sun brings a variety of voices to your ear — some candid, some cajoling, some joyous, and all of them looking you in the eye and telling the capital-T Truth — then I hope you’ll consider making a donation and becoming A Friend of The Sun. Any amount you give helps bring us together in the magazine’s pages month after month.
November 2023Speak, Memory
Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia
Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?
Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.
November 2023
Gratitude
A second chance at work, a shared meal in the classroom, a helpful stranger at a rest stop
November 2023
The Patron Saint Of Airport Sparrows
Now that I make the frequent arrivals / and departures of a child who grew up / and moved away from his parents, / who grow older and sicker and smaller / between visits, I feel too sad to read / while I wait for boarding to start
November 2023Deformation Catalog
I had thought nobody understood dark matter — that it was, fundamentally, an encapsulation of all we didn’t know. But it turned out other people’s lack of understanding took the form of complex theories, mathematical equations, computer programs that turned impenetrable data into different impenetrable data. Other people’s confusion was a castle you could live inside, a whole architecture of the unknown. My confusion was a wall I kept walking into.
November 2023
Sunbeams
The challenge of running The Sun continues to occupy me. Sometimes it occupies me like a conquering army, sometimes like the Holy Ghost. Either way I’m grateful for the chance to do this work month after month, year after year — a man happy to have found his cross to bear. Yes, even living your dream can feel like a burden now and then. But, my oh my, to live your dream! And not just when you’re sleeping, but every morning when you open your eyes. Then you sit in the dark and write a few words. Then the sun comes up.
Sy Safransky’s Notebook, May 2006
November 2023
