On the Music of Distraction
The pitch of the accordion begins low in the dark, but as the spotlight slowly focuses, I see the bellows of the instrument open up, the top ahead of...
I’d Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff
Today, in leafing through a bundle of letters to Kyrgyzstan, postmarked in Colorado, a sense of guilt begins to build. The feeling that I abandoned this...
When You Told Me It Wasn’t a Honeymoon
So we stayed on the trail and followed it down through the brush and over a rushing stream with soaked stones the color of chicken skin. Above us, the...
A Final Infidelity
In the end, there is just me: a twenty-nine year old Minnesota Man careening along the interstate, heading back east to Saint Paul on a humid August Friday...
Third Molars
They emerged in the spring: three little newborn pockets of wisdom that did not settle into place until June. In the time between they rose to the height of...
Ohio
1. Go into bathroom 2. Lights on 3. Shut door 4. Lock door 5. Tie back hair 6. Take off glasses, if wearing 7. Take off shirt 8. Take off rings on right...
Straight Up
We’ll never sit down and talk. Chances are that the trajectory of our lives will push our paths further apart, not cause them to intersect. You will never...
Nature Nurture
On the red brick walkway outside our front door, I look up and see that the mist, so ethereal an hour ago, is rapidly vanishing. The sun, a bright white...
The North Side
When I was fifteen, my father re-enlisted in a war I didn’t know he had been fighting. He wanted to move back to the north side, he said. Back to the...
Birthday Trip to Père La Chaise
It’s February and we’re standing beneath a gray, birdless sky. Arm in arm eating mangosteens purchased from a wrinkled old man in a woolen hat and...