When I heard about the death of pop singer Amy Winehouse, age 27, I immediately had two reactions. The first was great sadness. You can see the train wreck coming, but that doesn’t make the resulting smashup any less tragic or senseless. It is always sobering to witness great talent and the waste of great…

Until about a month ago, I had never knowingly listened to a song by Lady Gaga. I don’t listen to Top 40 radio, and I haven’t watched MTV in at least a decade, but one evening, fast-forwarding through an episode of Saturday Night Live we had recorded on the DVR—the only way that Jess and…

I drink with train hoppers. I seek them out, hang with them. My wife is fine with it. She accepts my fascination with them, even if she doesn’t fully understand it. Here in Lynchburg, Virginia, in among the train hoppers is where I find the gang I’m looking for: a cluster of former Liberty University…

When is the last time you’ve had to say goodbye to someone? I mean really had to say goodbye, the kind of goodbye that means, “I don’t know when we will see each other or talk to each other again on this earth.” Most likely it was when someone you knew was dying. Think about…

Continued from Friday. In my last two posts, I wrote about disappointing and rewarding time-travels at the movies. But the strangest film I’ve seen recently took me back in time even farther, into realms of folklore and primitive religion. And like both The Tree of Life and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it brought me to…

Doc Brown might disagree, but Hollywood says you don’t need a DeLorean to visit the past. This summer, your local cineplex is offering time travel at twelve bucks a ticket. In my last Good Letters post, I noticed that most 2011 moviegoers are visiting old familiar faces—Captain Jack Sparrow, the Transformers, the Muppets, Magneto, the…

I grew up in an apartment in the city. Through my formative years, my environment was made mostly of cement, yardless buildings, narrow alleyways, laundromats, buses, storefronts, and house cats. We did live a few blocks from Golden Gate Park, but it’s not the kind of park where you can go so deep in that…

First, perhaps most prominently, there was the dress I wore to my mother’s funeral: a cotton broadcloth shift dress, princess-seamed and with box pleats around the knee-length hem, that had been a hand-me-over from my sister-in-law. The dress was sleeveless, but I did wear high-heeled shoes, a black spandex slip, and stockings. It was around…

The first night I was in Rwanda, I was asked to facilitate group discussion among the thirteen students and five faculty members who were about to spend our ten days there. So I did what I usually do when I am asked to teach. I came up with fourteen questions that dealt with various abstract…

The word “conversion” reminds me of Anne Lamott, whose own Damascus Road story is one that I love telling my students: Lamott recalls the fevered days after an abortion when, drunk and spotting blood, she noticed a stray cat sitting at her doorstep. The cat followed Lamott everywhere, down the street and to the liquor…