For my son, Alex In the final months before our hamster died, I would lie in bed late at night, wondering if he was still alive. In the quiet of the house, after my husband had left for work at 3:00 a.m. and my children were asleep in their beds, I would strain my ears…

I stood in the security line at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans wondering if I was going to be detained, and taken for dangerous. Hell, I didn’t know, was this something for which I could be arrested? Maybe I should’ve let my brother talk me into sending the glossy, fitted wood box on ahead via mail—though that would have been exorbitant. Plus, I didn’t want to let it out of my hands.

The summer after my freshman year in college, I made the mistake of signing a lease without noticing that the place had no air conditioning. The lease was for a bedroom in an informal boardinghouse set up by the widowed owner of a large, falling-apart, turn-of-the-century house in Uptown New Orleans. (But of course!, you ’re thinking, she is making this up for literary effect!)

God became man, so that man might become God. —St. Athanasius What you find-ah / What you feel now / What you know-a / To be real —Cheryl Lynn God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk. —Meister Eckhart   How do you talk about God to people who…

I do not want to be a good person. I want to be a holy person.

And on this festival day, I am feeling once again my status as the Chief of Sinners, slipping out of the house with unwashed hair in a faded, above-the-knee, sleeveless, beach sundress.

“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress…

I lay my head down on the steering wheel of my car and burst into tears. From the back of the car, my seven-year-old son bleated over his seat, “I’m sorry, Mama! I didn’t mean it!” Outside the day wasn’t cold, but it was gray nonetheless, and the grungy, not-hardly-big-enough back parking lot of Politics…

We bought our rickety old house almost seven years ago: an eternity of time, it seems to us now. It was winter then and we had just one child—a son, our first, a little butterbean with bright blue eyes whose bright flaxen hair stuck out like cotton from the top of his quilted coat. We…

Even as I made the desperate, early September phone call to sign up for Mommy and Me ballet, I was watching myself, with more than a little bit of amusement. I’d been monitoring the website for weeks, trying to wait until the last possible minute when available class space would coincide with my ability to…