Shadows

“When my daughter was a teenager and going through a particularly difficult time, I asked her to take a walk one evening,” my Uncle George told me during our visit last summer. “I said to her, ‘Do you know what I don’t like in you? [Pause] It’s what I see in myself.’”...

Fall Part III

Three years ago, the red oak trees here at Vanaprastha produced a bumper crop of acorns. When the wind blew, acorns peppered the deck and roof like hail stones. Keith and I thought this was a response to the disruption of building the house, as if the Oaks were...

Choices

“Faith is a choice like any other,” Mary Karr wrote in Lit, a memoir about alcoholism and redemption. More than anything, Lit is about making choices – the difficult ones. The title reflects a choice people make every day, and the consequences. Anyone...

Professionals

“I used to think people were looking at me when I walked into a room,” my son David said during his visit this past weekend. “But people weren’t really paying attention to me; they were thinking about themselves like I was. People like to talk about themselves,...

Monsters

In Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak told the story of a young boy named Max. Dressed as a wolf, Max misbehaved and was sent to his room. There he had a temper tantrum and wound up in a mysterious place with beasts called Wild Things – monsters. Childhood...