Deep inside our eyes, next to the dark velvet lake of the aqua vitreous, are cones and rods. The rods allow us to see in the gloaming, but only in grayscale. The cones are responsible for color, but they need light to work.
After a wretched, wakeful night, my hot head buzzing with annoyance, I sat squirming in my study waiting for Ollie to arrive. At nine he put his head in, smiling with his usual greeting, “How are we doing, Andy?”
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.
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.
I spent my seventy-first birthday driving an hour from our home in rural Tennessee and sitting for six hours in and around the Murfreesboro Medical Center while my wife, Erin, had four toes on her left foot operated on. The right foot was...
Among tall silver birches. Dogs yipping beyond the timberline. In my bag, a clementine for us to split. The river’s image trembles as you dip your foot in, raking the pebbles back and forth till silt rises to the surface.
