Impressions flood in on me: grayness; verticality; burning; ice, splitting; verdancy. The distant; the present. Wild swathes of light, of intense growth—is that a tree? a body of water? fire? Cold, crisp, thin air? I am standing in a small, warmly lit gallery. Paintings on the third and fourth days of creation surround me. Substances…

My one-year Bible has me in Acts. It also has me in Kings, but I’ve temporarily abandoned the rulers of Aram, Elisha and his floating axe heads, and the mysterious woman of Shunem. I’m hoping to regain some sense of the world depicted on the pages as at least distantly related to present reality as…

The things you do for your children. Or rather, the things you unwittingly do for yourself. It was an early autumn Thursday afternoon, four days after the ten-year anniversary of September 11, 4:25 p.m. If we didn’t leave the house right then, we were never going to get to my seven-year-old son’s inaugural golf lesson…

By no dint of my own doing, it couldn’t have been a more well-timed pitch for network television. Three weeks I’d been preparing for the trip to L.A., fleshing out the premise, characters, and pilot storyline for a show about the world of first responders to natural disasters. I’d even come up with a title…

After my parents’ divorce, my mother moved us kids to a trailer on the northeast side of town. It was long and narrow, like a ship’s galley, and the wallpaper’s thin brown stripes seemed to carve themselves into the drywall. The trailer never felt like home, never felt like a place you could settle. We…

My brother and his wife are about to have their first baby. This is my first letter to her. Emerson, By this point you are no doubt aware, even if it’s scary for you to admit, that all these adults crowding around you all the time do some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things…

When Tolstoy says that happy families are all alike, what he means is that they are all alike in this one thing: they are boring, not worth writing about. Unhappy families. Now those are interesting. Last night my wife and I—and our two teenage boys and pre-teen girl—celebrated our third wedding anniversary. In these three…

As I was biking today, a squirrel ran across the road with a big nut in its mouth. Squirreling it away, I thought. Then I thought: sign of autumn. Then I thought: that means packing up for Tucson. Which means (I sighed to myself) leaving behind my shelves of poetry books for five months. I’m…

I am between flights. It’s a four-day wait in this case, and I can spend it at home, so it probably doesn’t constitute a proper layover. But it feels like a layover, and I have a difficult time concentrating on anything but my connecting flight, the one that will unite me with my sister. I’m…

Most days he’s not there, standing just this side of the traffic light, his flimsy cardboard sign asking for help for a person down on his luck. When I do see him on my way home from big-boxville, I always pay more attention to the letters—the childish scrawl—on his sign than I do to him.…