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…

My mother is an exhibitionist. Her freedom with her body is beautiful to me, signaling a lack of vanity, a comfort with aging, a kind of joy in the healthy softness of her small frame, which bore all three of my sisters and myself and is just now beginning to show the creped swags of…

My husband Ben grew up Catholic; I grew up Southern Baptist. As love stories like ours go, it was probably inevitable that we would meet at an Episcopalian church. On our first date, he bought me my first beer; shortly thereafter, he fell asleep, drunk, on my bed, where partygoers put coats on top of…

The wisteria was succulent and blue last spring when I met an older colleague, a woman I am prone to revere, for lunch at Dupont Circle’s Iron Gate Inn. Iron Gate is a restaurant I had passed and peered into, wondering what it would be like to eat a meal under its trellis of climbing…

My husband Ben just started his third year of medical school: running the gauntlet of twenty-six-hour shifts, cranky surgeons, and “pimping” on the rounds—the crude term for masochistic bedside Q&A sessions. Meanwhile, back at home, the brutal schedule has required yet another consideration of how we share domestic duties. I wasn’t alive when Peggy Lee…

Jeremiah Rose. I wish I could give him a pseudonym, but no other name can properly conjure his image: skinny, six feet tall; a thick beard and ponytail, and pale, roving eyes like holes cut in a mask. He wears casteless ripped jeans and T-shirts, but his backpack, with a hardhat clipped and dangling from…

My housemates and I have been getting our nightly fix of the Democratic and Republican conventions via old-school radio. As we cook, read and tend children, proclamations echo through our cavernous old house like the din of some semi-distant calamity. The weather has been unseasonably cool here in Washington, DC, and all of our house’s…

The birds’ wings shake out the smell of the men who sleep in the park: the smell of meat, sweat, and bread. The birds lift up and fly away as I ride my bike through the park’s courtyard, and in the trees a stone Cardinal sits on a throne, staring down at the ground where…

I remember Adam’s dream as if it had been my own dream, and I recall the spring in which he dreamed it as if I lived that time in his body: fearing the flat horizons that hemmed in Kansas City’s bleak skyline, but fearing the empty city, too; driving the snaking black-tops between his grandparents’…

For a bureaucrat, there is no greater ignominy than getting upstaged by a political appointee. I did not feel the bite of this truism until last Wednesday, when I found myself, in peep-toe heels, trundling fifteen painstakingly prepared briefing binders in a dog-hair-covered hiking backpack to our agency’s Office of the Deputy Secretary. Regarding the…