There’s a woman standing at the roadside next to a car with a pretty impressive dent in the front of it. She’s been in a crash, obviously, and she’s distraught about it — the hanging head, the quivering jaw, the eyes welling with tears. I empathize, of course — but it could have been worse. […]

I distinctly remember a day in early May. I oozed from my bed in the middle of the afternoon and found the world ablaze with sunlight. It was warm, birds were singing and the only remnant of winter was the glowing whiteness of my flesh. I went into the backyard to have an animated conversation […]

On Saturday, I watched a couple groups of kids playing baseball at a mini-Fenway Park in Oakland. For two hours they battled, swatting so many hits and racking up so many runs no existing form of mathematics could possibly calculate the score. You’d need to employ tenth powers, degrees of polynomials and possibly gerunds to […]

Sooner or later, we all get the letter. “My dear friends,” it begins. “Sadly and with enormous trepidation, I must announce after (impressive number here) years, I’m leaving the (your company name here) family.” A brief explanation follows, during which the letter writer will pretend he’s not gloating when — I mean, come on — […]

There’s a picture at my mother’s house in Waterville that I refuse to look at anymore. It’s a simple family photo: my brother and I, dressed in our spiffy Sunday suits, standing on either side of our father a year or two before he died. For many years, I could look upon that picture and […]