Leftovers, 1993

Interstate 64 from Richmond, Virginia, to Newport News tunnels through thick and silent stands of pitch pines. Occasionally there are breaks in the trees, and the traveler glimpses a farmhouse, peanut fields or a swampy depression in the landscape where cypress knees swim in brackish lagoons. But mostly it’s just pine trees and pine trees. They crowd the interstate and block the view on both sides of the highway. At night—when I do most of my driving—the moonlight pools on the pavement. Stars appear in the narrow cut of sky above.

My Father’s Women

When I drove my sisters back to town from the lawyer’s three days after our father’s death, it took a while for us to arrive at the subject of his women. The lawyer had given us a rundown on the will—no surprises, 20 percent to each of us, a little more to his final companion and a little less to his two stepdaughters from his second marriage. We knew that his estate, which included a parking lot in a commercial district in Tokyo as well as a summer house near Mount Fuji, was considerable. Yet none of us had any idea where the right documents were, and for some time our conversation shuttled from where to look for them to what kind of service to hold to how to clear the house of its clutter to when to see the body and how best to lay it to rest.

The Kuhreihen Melody

Sometimes, while drifting off to sleep, I play a game with myself. I imagine myself in Bethel, Connecticut, my hometown, circa 1964, when I was six or seven. I imagine myself walking down Main Street, slipping into its shops and stores as they were back then. The object of the game is simple: to piece together, as comprehensively as possible, out of the Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and Lego bricks of memory, the place where I grew up, down to the smallest trivial details. Store by store, night after night, I reassemble my past.

My Days with the Antimafia

I followed Edoardo up to his office on the second floor. He told me the previous tenant had been a Mafioso. In one corner hung a large cutout of a tree with head shots of men—Libero Grassi, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino (the two anti-Mafia magistrates assassinated in 1992)—pasted on its branches. Above them arched the words, in Italian: “You are not alone anymore.”

Strange Comfort

I had been going to Mia for about a year, and all of this was routine: the slight ping of the needle as it pierced my skin and the tap-tap of Mia’s finger as she delicately and authoritatively plunged the sharp tip to a painless spot below the surface. It always felt as though my body were a wall and she the handyman, expertly punching the Lilliputian nails into place. With the needles set and the blanket warming me, I rested on my back with my eyes closed and my arms by my sides. Several minutes must have passed. And then something really weird happened.

Dancing for the Bomb

As best as I remember, the super 8 silent video camera was a present for my fourteenth birthday. It involved a certain amount of pleading and door-banging and huffing and goose-stepping around the living room and usual good old-fashioned blackmail—but not too much, as my parents, in conflict with one another and, unbeknownst to their children, near divorce, were easy prey. Now, over thirty years later, the number 800 sticks in my mind—as in 800 Iranian tomans, equal to about $120 at the time, a large sum (about five months of our live-in maid’s salary). Or was it 8000 tomans, $1200? Eight thousand sounds more realistic for a foreign-made video camera in the pre­revolutionary Iran of the mid-1970s. The super 8 was a Sony, black and sleek, with geared, battery-operated buttons for zoom and focus, the clicky turning of which sounded like happiness. Its hard case was padded with soft, spongy foam. Its manual, colorful and bright and glossy, was in multiple languages in parallel columns—a small modern Rosetta Stone in Tehran, the city in which I was born to a middle-class Jewish family and that I had come to think of as the land of my childhood exile.

The Carroll Capris

It was not that we thought they were gangsters when they walked through the door. In their long coats and stingy-brim hats, in the way they stood and the expressions on their faces, we could see they were from the rackets squad, and they were scary. By the time I was fourteen years old, I had attracted the attention of the police a few times, and I thought I knew what they were like. But the calm, almost bored look of these guys, who had simply strolled into the Capri Athletic Club on Carroll Street, was new to me.

Elegy and Narrative

The year after my wife died, I compulsively watched television. I needed distraction, to be entertained. What I could not stream online or order through the mail I sought out at the local video store. I was living in a suburb of Indianapolis, about a mile from a strip mall where I could rent, in a pinch, midseason discs of The Wire, The Office, Friday Night Lights. I got to know the clerks by name, then their shifts, finally their tastes. Once, I tried to make a formal complaint against the corporate headquarters regarding the suspicious and perpetual absence of Battlestar Galactica. It seemed unjust that the universe would conspire to deny my knowledge of its fictional origins. I worked up a good head of steam before leaving, distraught. The offense was egregious, and entirely my own. I went back a few days later, during a different shift.

Cruising through the Necropolis

As a tenth-grade biology student in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, I was required to assemble a leaf collection. Aside from the catalpa, gingko, oak, maple and maybe buckeye, I can’t recall any of the other specimens that I ironed between two sheets of wax paper, identified by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species, then handed over in an awkward three-ring binder with embarrassing sloppiness and bare-minimum ambition, to our teacher, Mr. Matthews. I squirm today to think of how my dunderheaded, adolescent indifference then was an insult to whatever Adam first named the hickory and the larch, the locust, the hornbeam and the leatherwood, and to all those later poets who tuned the language of the flora even further, with names like frosty lacebark elm, Warren’s red possumhaw, mountain silverbell, common rose mallow, weeping purple European beech, prariefire crabapple and sparkleberry winter holly.

Lay of The Land

Kabul, Afghanistan, November 2001

From my bed I hear Bro and our other translators laughing downstairs.

Eight A.M.

I slip on my clothes without bathing. We have little power, and the water never warms. I have decided to hold out against the frigid shower for days if necessary, until I can no longer stand my funky self. I run downstairs and warm water for coffee on the kitchen hotplate.

On Loneliness

At twenty-two, I joined the Peace Corps. There are plenty of reasons why people do this; some are ill conceived and don’t get shared aloud, perhaps because they can’t be articulated. For me, it was the need to escape what seemed the loneliest feeling in the world: I was in my twenties and sure I’d never be loved, equally sure that no one but I had ever felt this way before. I was years away from reading Lyn Hejinian, who illuminated the direness the woman I was at that time was certain of but couldn’t have expressed. “I would be single all my life and lonely in old age,” she explains of her own thoughts as a young woman. “In such a situation it is necessary to make a choice between contempt and an attempt at understanding, and yet it is difficult to know which is the form of retreat.” My retreat? I left the “Country Preference” line blank on my application and hoped whereever I was sent would be far enough away that nothing could follow me. I was assigned to a small village in the middle of Uzbekistan. It could have been anywhere: Africa or China or South America; it didn’t matter.

U.S. and Them, 1971

My father worked in a white T-shirt, off-white overalls and construction boots that were spattered with paint and crusted with Spackle. His fingers looked like wooden spindles, whitish as if they’d been stripped and then antiqued, and no matter how he scrubbed or what he wore, my father always smelled like turpentine: kind of clean and kind of poisonous. Maria said her father was an executive at General Electric. Terri’s father worked at the New York Stock Exchange. Donna told me her dad was a corporate attorney, and I had heard enough. Corporate attorney, commodities trader, CEO: suit-and-tie occupations. With the luxury of sitting behind a desk, my classmates’ fathers might as well be wearing slippers, too. I never went out of my way to tell anyone that my father was a house painter but I never denied him or what he did for a living. Whenever someone asked me who my father worked for, I was happy to announce that he worked for himself. I took pride in the fact that my father really worked for our bread and butter.

Helpline

Although we weren’t exactly drug-dependent, at least in terms of how drug dependency had been defined in the mimeographed packet we’d been handed while undergoing volunteer Helpline training, and we weren’t stoners compared to some of our friends who toked even more than we did, most of us who worked shifts at the university’s telephone crisis line smoked a lot of marijuana. We joked that it was an occupational hazard. All that stress. All those panicked calls from people not right at that moment enjoying the effects of their own drugs of choice, or telling us at great length the ways their lives truly and deeply sucked. We lit up the second our shifts were over, often on the way to our cars in the union building parking lot, sharing a joint and, if someone had thought ahead, a bottle of something, anything, alcoholic. And then, weather permitting, adjournment to a nearby city park to smoke and drink some more. All that drug talk on the phone; all that human misery we couldn’t avoid ingesting a fair amount of as it cascaded over the phone: fears of where bad trips were heading, thoughts of suicide, more mundane yet really depressing narratives of loneliness—I’m so ugly, I’m so alone, I’m so pathetic I’m calling you.

A Vocabulary for My Senses

After six months at language school in northern Ethopia, we finally moved south to our first mission station. Father, whose career as a doctor had been on hold, was posted to a hospital near the town of Soddo, in Wallayta district. There, we occupied a real house instead of a temporary apartment.

I’m OK, You’re OK

This text is not currently available online.

Unstrung

This text is not currently available online.

“Look Down, Don’t Look Down”

One afternoon during the fall of my senior year, I found myself camped out on some industrial tile near the Hamden High School pool with a spiral-bound reader, halfway through Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Concrete Relations with Others” and already drowning in his words. Pursued-pursuing. Transcendence-transcended. Being-in-Itself. I was highlighting a chapter of Sartre’s philosophical treatise while waiting for my girlfriend’s swim meet to begin, but every time I made it through a few sentences, I found it difficult to breathe.

Bard of the Bottle

Tom was a terrible influence, of course. That friendship was scorched earth. He died at fifty-four, though he looked a couple of decades older. I just turned fifty-four yesterday. But that friendship made me everything I am. Without it, I wouldn’t even be a poet, I think…

The Saddest Music Ever Written

Barber’s Adagio is the Pietá of music. It captures the sorrow and the pity of tragic death: listening to it, we are Mother Mary, come alive-holding the lifeless Christ on our laps, one arm bracing the slumped head, the other offering him to the ages. The Adagio is a sound shrine to music’s power to evoke emotion. Its elegiac descent is among the most moving expressions of grief in any art. The snail-like tempo, the constrained melodic line, its rise and fall, the periodic rests, the harmonic repetition, the harmonic color, the uphill slog, the climactic moment of its peaked eruption-all are crafted together into one magnificent effect: listeners, weeping in anguish, bear the glory and gravity of their grief. No sadder music has ever been written.

Days and Nights with MS: The Witness Complains

My husband isn’t crazy. He teaches, he writes, with some renown. At a forthcoming writing conference, a panel will meet to discuss his life and work. Moreover, as a personality generally, he’s easygoing, charming. He has multiple sclerosis; he needs a wheelchair, and for the past three or four years he has needed someone to lift him from his bed onto the chair. But he has maintained till recently a clear-minded, unresentful, wry, even amused posture in a situation that would demoralize most people: I’m still alive. Seth and Sharon are alive. In the end we all have to die anyway. Our friends, his mother, my parents marvel. He handles it so well.

Between the Sailor and the Sail: The Faith of Ken Kesey

In his own community, Ken Kesey wasn’t a stranger. One can see his influence everywhere in Eugene and Pleasant Hill, whether it’s yogurt from the family creamery in a local store, a statue of the writer reading to children on Willamette Street, or a farmer in a tie-dyed shirt ploughing his fields. In the Willamette Valley that winter, there was vast sympathy for the man who had disappeared from the rest of the country. The family received hundreds of letters, and reading through local newspapers, one finds commiseration and indignation from the most unlikely of sources.

Famous

On the night of November 26, 2008, two men walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, and started shooting and throwing grenades into the crowds of travelers “indiscriminately,” as reported in the official Indian account of the attack. In a railway station that accommodates two million passengers every day, a place where one can hardly stand during peak hours without being swept into a river of people, they couldn’t very well have missed. In minutes the dead and dying lay throughout the concourse, their limbs splayed in grotesque postures, and blood pooled on the station’s concrete floor.

What Happens to Heroes

I rolled the glass vial in my hand, back and forth, as if I were rocking the steroids to sleep. Ben had just lifted it from a small box hidden in his bedroom. The box looked like the kind of case gamblers might carry to hold their chips all in a row. I’d watched Ben’s big fingers pry open the latches and raise the lid. Inside, several small vials were lined up neatly, the syringes askew; two of them slanted so that the skinny needles pointed right at me.

Patient

The bus will have to move. I’m under its rear tires on the passenger side, and with the crowd, the driver can’t see me in the mirror. “Can you please tell him to move?” I say to someone leaning over me. It is easy to be calm because I cannot really have been run over by a bus.

A Hive of Mysterious Danger

If you we re to remove the roof tops from these prisons, you would uncover a world of dramatic intensities, a world of cruelty and faith and madness and perversion and boredom and humor and tragedy and despair. But it is a world almost entirely ignored by the broader taxpaying public….