Overhead the Kentucky sky was clear and went on forever. I don’t really remember how we parted or where I went after, only that he wanted to stay awhile, that at some point he hugged me, tucked a cig behind his ear, and started down toward...
It is strange, looking back, to think how different things could have been. Years ago, the company I work for undertook a number of joint ventures in China. We didn’t understand the place well, but the industry was in transition, and it was...
I drive out Old Frankfort Pike past the ditch by the creek where you pulled off on New Year’s Day to pick from the mud that Jack Russell with swollen nipples and bring her back to the farm.
Sommy notices his legs first, hairy and stumpy, the part not covered by his tan-colored shorts. He’s standing by the airport’s exit, watching a woman on tiptoes, a piece of cardboard held above her head. His name is Bayo, Sommy’s new...
What do we do with the undertow of grief that remains when someone we love, or something we need, is gone? We’re taught to celebrate milestones, our achievements and additions, but are never taught how to grieve. It seems like an important...
Yesterday, my son taught me the sign for lockdown— different than locking a door, or the shutdown we invented at the start of the pandemic. Little fistfuls of locks swept quickly between us, a sign designed especially for school.
I was perched, fully clothed, on Erich Honecker’s toilet seat, hoping for the night to end. My friend Isa was turning fifty and she’d invited every Berliner of her acquaintance from the over three decades she’d lived in the city to her...
We don’t exist in a soup of probabilities. We each carve a narrow path through the breadth of the possible—the sum of all choices we’ve made and all that were made for us.
