More on: family

My father’s latest stray, half-grown half-husky racing through puddles, won’t last long.

In the conversation around faith and film, Ron Austin is an elder statesman. He has worked a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and his essays and books, including In a New Light: Spirituality and Media Arts, have influenced generations of filmmakers (much of his writing is also on his website). His seminal essay “The Spiritual…

THE FAMILY-ROOM TELEVISION came to us through fire and smoke like in the old miracles. It was the mid-aughts, and my father was working at a building restoration company, which is one way to say he waded through disaster for a living. Fire, smoke, water—the words emblazoned on the side of his car read like…

Then it enters the upstairs room, to rest beside my grandmother, a Korean War widow who sold her home and bid farewell to clan and country, arriving in Arkansas to raise two children while their parents worked, who surrendered her strength in the last days of 1988 to a second stroke, but not before teaching me how to read a love letter.

The pain passes, ——but the beauty remains.                             —Renoir Wandering the Musée de l’Orangerie with my sister, we find a bouquet of roses painted in 1878 by Auguste Renoir, voluptuous white roses placed in a red velvet chair. My sister says Renoir’s last word was “flowers” and that toward the end of his life he…

Someone tells someone she knows someone who writes fiction and memoir. The second someone, or party of the second part, asks the party of the third part if she would read a short essay by his wife, who died last year of ovarian cancer. How could the party of the third part refuse? No longer…

This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness. Maybe it’s my father’s. For having never been prized by his father. For having never profited by his son. This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely because Nobody was never born and will never die. This gloom is Someone Else’s. Someone Else is gloomy because he’s always…

  New Plymouth   WHAT DROVE SUCH PILGRIMS across the sea of southern Idaho, dry plain, sage and antelope? Doesn’t any place hold God, smooth stones to pillow dreams of angels, one rock fitted upon another, raising the pilgrim’s testament: I have come as far as here? How did the displaced, one by one, know…