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All At Once
Thursday September 2, 2010
A week or so ago, I stood in a place that’s one of my favorites, looking out upon a view that I’ll always consider the best, and at a time of day that did the whole experience justice—though in truth, no time is a bad one to stand there. I went to this place because it’s likely I won’t get to stand there much longer (another story for another time)—and so wanted to imprint on my memory its every dimension—sights, sounds, smells, the touch and taste of its air on my skin and tongue. I wanted to “flood the senses,” as we’re told we can do, and capture all of what’s best about it in the bottle of my brain. So there I stood, attentive as a soldier called to order—every faculty, keen and whetted....
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My Hometown...and Yours?
Wednesday September 1, 2010
Dear Good Letters community, you know, sometimes you just have to phone it in. I’m sitting here on a hot sunny day in Jackson, Mississippi on vacation at my brother’s, and am just about to visit my hometown of Yazoo City for the first time in three years. I anticipate that there will be a lot to write about that encounter—it’s the first time my six-year-old son will have seen my childhood home, or that our family, together, will have strewn flowers over my father’s grave. We will drive into the Delta and my Yankee children will see rows of cotton lapping past the car for the very first time. I’ll look forward to describing our adventures in the coming weeks. For now, though, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite books about hometowns and their strange and critical presence in American life....
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My House as Allegory
Tuesday August 31, 2010
I think there probably are people who don’t interpret cracks in their bathroom ceilings as evidence either of cosmic doom or of personal inadequacy. I am not one of those people. My friend Amanda said as much to reassure me the other day, and then she laughed a bit at us both. I’d lain most of the previous night wide awake, unable to settle, fretting about my crumbling ceiling and my evaporating bank account and the circuitous trail of causality that had landed me there. I bought my first house about a year ago. It’s a 1940’s bungalow in a hip little neighborhood of Jackson, and I love so much about it. But the first night I slept in the house, I killed forty-seven cockroaches. One roach even fell on my face as I turned over in bed, causing me to convulse, disgusted, all the way out of the bed. The second night....
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How to Pray at Ground Zero
Monday August 30, 2010
I met Daisy Kahn and her husband Imam Feisal Rauf a few summers ago at The Chautauqua Institute, the western New York interfaith arts community. They have long been featured speakers there. That summer, my husband and I had a chance to sit and chat with them for about an hour about their creative initiatives for bridge-building between American Muslims and non-Muslims. In 1997, they had founded the New York-based American Society for Muslim Advancement....
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Last Night I Was Thinking of You
Friday August 27, 2010
It is last night, many nights and years ago, a night when I drank a glass of wine and then I cut my hair. The wine I drank from the fat bulb of a fine crystal wine glass—the finest glass we owned, one of a wedding gift pair, against which all cheap plates and plastics looked pale and unreal. I held the glass in one hand as I lay reading in the white-washed cave of our basement apartment, stroking the glass with a finger: seeing the clear moisture wick down when the wine swirled and settled, seeing the print of my lips—no color, only skin—feathered on the rim. “Do you remember,” I asked my husband, but as I spoke I remembered....
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The Architecture of Richard Meier, An Interview with Gregory Orr, Poetry by Franz Wright, Essay by A.G. Harmon.
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