More on: childhood

Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley on an east Pennsylvania rite of passage.

There was no religion in our house. For years I thought it was a hole, a gap in the woodwork I needed to fill.

Under this skylight many lost things are visible. I see the mighty black and yellow spiders in the iris beds by the old garage and feel not a shred of fear. I could husk two dozen sticky ears of sweet corn and pick two quarts of strawberries on my achy knees without whining once. I…

Hirokazu Kore-eda (2011) BY THE END OF CELEBRATED DIRECTOR Hirokazu Kore-eda’s delightful 2011 fable I Wish, two preteen brothers, living in different towns with their separated parents, will have traveled across the Japanese countryside with a gaggle of school friends to watch two bullet trains speed past each other at a new track point. They…

It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…

In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics…only as a spectrum of possibilities.                                         —Stephen Hawking Too often they kept on surfacing suddenly, stifling…

These days I write elegies and read the Metaphysicals. And when I turn the radio on prefer to hear a pennywhistle playing “Purple Heather.” In all weathers I wander back to parishes where I feel nostalgia for the doughnut shop and the junkyard where things were given a second chance.   It was there that…

A child sees inside the stained-glass window the pride of the garden that came before the hand that raised this smoke, this corpse, this rose. His mother signals him to pray with those who come to kneel beneath the candle fire. The child sees inside their stained-glass window the petals of the wound that cannot…

The Voice of This Calling Art and Vocation FOUR days after I turned three, my sister was born. I was young enough to be confused and anxious about what was going on. My mother had grown large and then abruptly disappeared from our apartment, where I was left with a sitter. This all took place…