If Men Could Menstruate
Living in India made me understand that a white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking a white skin makes people superior, even though the only thing it really does is make...
View ArticleThe Moa Stalker
In Auckland, New Zealand, I was roosting in the common room of this crap budget flophouse, perusing my guidebook and gearing up to fly to Fiji soon despite a recent military coup, when the heated...
View ArticlePictures in the Mud
One afternoon in late June, my three year old daughter skipped out of her playhouse with her toy telephone in hand and announced, "Mamaw has a new brother! And we have a new uncle! And he wants to talk...
View ArticleDining in French
One of the unifying features of domestic France is a network of window boxes that burst with cascading geraniums of the brightest pink. I have observed this window box network from the soft stone...
View ArticleA Day at the Beach
On Thursday, I took a water taxi out to the Fire Island lighthouse museum with Lucy and her family. The museum was closed, but the park ranger was nice enough to let us in to watch a video about the...
View ArticleJury Duty
I knew it was a mistake to vote. There's something un-American about voting, after all. I mean, sure, it's great that we can vote, but to actually go through it — to get hold of one of those...
View Article14 Crossings
The modernist Marcel Duchamp once argued that America's only contribution to art (aside from phenomenal plumbing) are her bridges. My four-year-old twins might agree.
View ArticleI Made It Myself
The year was 1958. Needs were jostling one another in my fretful mind. My chief concern was measuring up to the promise of a marvelous marriage. This was all tangled up with making things. We loved...
View ArticleThe Camphor Suitcase
In the recent Year of the Snake — I remember because it’s my daughter’s sign — the image of a maroon suitcase made of camphor wood began to follow me like a phantom. It became most vivid in the dusk as...
View ArticleThe Fox Breaks The Code
In his will, my 87-year-old lawyer father included the proviso that the definition of grandchildren who would benefit from his estate included, in addition to any extant grandchildren, “any child born...
View ArticleA Sort of Welcoming
José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva cups his hands and blows into them, the hot breath of hope on a cold day. Far from his native home of Brazil, he walks along the edge of a tiny island off Sweden. This...
View ArticleAll Aboard — or Maybe Not
The thought of traveling always fills me with dread. I approach any major trip, no matter how delightful it promises to be, wondering, How will I cope? What will become of me? There are many ways to...
View ArticleThe Pedagogy of Decoration
My greatest challenge as a Seventh-Grade English teacher in “inner-city” Brooklyn was to gain firm control — not of my classroom — but of a pair of scissors. In the three years I spent in the public...
View ArticleGod of Books
First Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Essay Award. My uncle Henry Robbins was the God of Books. When a massive heart attack felled him at New York's 14th Street subway station nearly three decades ago, he...
View ArticleSpring
When my mother died the nurse came running. I heard her feet, muffled and far, thudding down the carpeted corridor. A hospice is no place for running; no one is there to be saved, there are no...
View ArticleBook of Hours
Second Prize, 2009 Literal Latte Essay Award. The ground comfortable as any bed. A whistle of grass between your teeth. The green blanket tickling and sticking to your sunburned arms, your thighs, the...
View ArticleWith These Shackles I Thee Wed
First Prize, 2010 Literal Latte Essay Award. It was a time when guys were cats, gals were chicks, the police were pigs, and spray-can graffiti said things like, "Up against the wall, Motherfucker!" [....]
View ArticleAddicted to Chad
Second Prize, 2010 Literal Latte Essay Award. When I was a child and my parents argued, my father used to escape to the basement and listen to his short-wave radio. Growing up in Philadelphia, I knew...
View ArticleTinkering with Grief in the Woods
First Prize, 2011 Literal Latte Essay Award. I sit in my shorts by an open window in Kentucky surrounded by a hundred sleeping monks. Beyond the monastery's stone walls, beyond the dark scrabbled woods...
View ArticleI’m Not Writing About Robin
Second Prize, 2011 Literal Latte Essay Award. My friend, Robin, died recently. I drove across the country to visit her before she died, to remind her that her bravery made me brave. She seemed...
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