“If life has no standing as mystery or miracle or gift, then what signifies the difference between it and death?”                                                                                                                   —Wendell Berry The evening of December 29 settled clear and cold, and my family was out in it, skiing on an Appalachian mountainside. As my wife and I rode the chairlift, the merest sliver…

His name was Peter, and he carried an L.L. Bean canvas bag, monogrammed and trimmed in forest green. It was December 28, 1988, and I noticed him at the gate. Preppy, but kind of cute. And then we boarded, and he took the seat next to mine. American Airlines; JFK to SFO; a DC-10, which…

January marks the anniversary of several family catastrophes. I keep trying to laugh about it, to applaud the humor of the general bloodletting. The impulse to laugh when things are really bad is a congenital defect—or a Darwinian asset, depending on how you look at it. My parents started it, and my three sisters and…

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” is more or less what I told my husband when he proposed creating me an account on Facebook. If you have even less experience than I with the now ubiquitous “social networking utility,” Facebook is a website where you can add brief diary entries, family and party pictures to…

With this post we welcome another contributor to Good Letters. Joel will be focusing mostly on music. One thing that I learned in 2008 is that everything is going to keep changing, all the time, and is always going to be not what it was last year. And what I want from songs now is…

Inspired by a similar tradition in David Brooks’ New York Times column (but with fewer pretensions to comprehensiveness—I am calling them favorites, not the most important or influential), here is a list of five essays or reviews that I have read, on the internet, which I think are worth printing out to read and ponder…

“Still all this beauty bows my head down And it also props me up.” —Reva Williams Most of my Boston friends and I share similar religious backgrounds. To varying degrees, we each consider ourselves expatriates of a sort from mainline Evangelicalism. We were raised by parents who came into their own in the iconoclastic 1970s,…

It’s 5:30 p.m. and I’m in my pajamas making stir-fry out of the decaying contents of my fridge while a miserably tired toddler clings to my leg and whines. I’ve suffered from inexplicable muscle cramping all day. I’m late with at least three freelance assignments. My husband is already an hour late and I’ve been…

Waiting is all around us, if we stop and pay attention. That’s one reason I love this time of year. We’re not used to waiting. A few days ago a Wal-Mart employee on Long Island was stampeded to death by impatient shoppers. As a child, I associated Advent with the stiff, single-sheeted Advent Calendars my…

“Writing is my one talent,” Mary Gordon once said. This came to mind as I finished Donald Hall’s memoir, Unpacking the Boxes, which I finally obtained from the library. (I was frugal long before the term recessionista emerged). The book centers on the poet’s life before he met his wife, Jane Kenyon, as well as…