More on: family

My grandfather moonlighted as a rabbi on Friday evenings when he should have been praying in the Bronx one-room apartment with no electricity and the claw-foot tub used for distilling whisky— not walking down 143rd Street below the globed gaslights, along the trolley tracks, past shuttered tobacco shops and Coca-Cola signage, towards Yonkers and the…

Marilynne Robinson—unapologetic Calvinist, committed humanist, brilliant writer—is undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary American authors. Born and raised in northern Idaho, she was educated at Pembroke College (now part of Brown University), where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and at the University of Washington, where she received her MA and PhD in literature. She…

Please give me the watches, Mother. Engraved 11-6-46. A gold Gruen and bracelet Bulova retired to a worn reliquary, a remote shelf, hall closet ripe: serial cakes of soap, tissue boxes, toothpaste on sale in case of another Depression. I’m surprised there are no smokes in there though Dad dragged on his last too late…

DON’T TOUCH MY CHILD,” the woman said. She and her son stood in front of me in the checkout line. Her son looked to be four, maybe five. A towhead. I had placed my hand on the short-cropped sunlight for the barest moment. The mother turned the boy toward me and pointed at my face. “Do…

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…

M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…

S HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL child and then a beautiful girl who seemed protected by an aura of goodness so that lascivious men kept their thoughts to themselves and didn’t lay a hand on her. But one afternoon her luck ran out during a hurricane which brushed New England in September of 1948. Her mother’s…

I WANTED TO LIGHT her a candle at the holy sanctuary at Chimayo. I chose a Saint Christopher candle: she had just died. Melinda may have died at forty-nine of a heart attack, though there was nothing wrong with her heart. Or she might have died by choking, following a week of seizures. Or it…

You can’t get away from pain, or your sister in pain, or the terrible wide doors of the handicap room. It will break your heart, the way she walks in the easy hotel pool, and then takes up her cane, to shuffle from chair to bed. We’ve picked two days halfway between our towns, to…

YOU YOURSELF are a holy mother,” Father Canevin was saying. He was speaking to Miss Dunn’s mother. He sat back in a leather chair that gave a short cough and squeak each time he moved, like an old, brittle bellows. Toom-beeph. Toom-beeph. Miss Dunn listened intensely to such sounds. They were like voices from a…