Twice, train whistles saved my life. Two instances separated by a hemisphere and nearly a decade. Here is the first. When I was 16 years old, I worked for a fast food chain. That summer, for reasons I don’t think I’ll ever understand, I was put in pseudo-charge of what Read more…
I was a basketball star of rural Midwestern proportions in my youth. I was a flash of a big-ish deal in a small-town, no-big-deal way. But I never took a game-winning shot at the buzzer, not in an official game. The closest I came: two free throws with four seconds Read more…
It was after midnight. My two friends and I pulled my dad’s aluminum extension ladder off the garage wall. We walked out of the garage into the dark, hoping we’d waited long enough for the neighborhood to be asleep. My parents were gone for the weekend. My house was the Read more…
As I knelt along Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, a woman short, round and worn, yelled at me in French. She was waving me away. Angrily. I did not understand why. My attention was focused through the lens of a vintage Canon A-1 35-millimeter film camera I’d brought along on my Read more…
Sometime during the summer of my tenth birthday, I learned how to do laundry. My mother was giving my oldest brother the procedural rundown before he went off to college as a freshman. I stood beside her, watched and listened. No one in the house was allowed to do laundry Read more…
I had a barracks roommate 25 years ago while in the Army, who for amusement broke down our lives into the varied job skills they contained. All the little stuff our days consisted of as soldiers that didn’t fit the job descriptions we’d signed up for. I don’t remember how Read more…
An outdoor batting cage stood between the Pyeongtaek (평택) train station and a lane where, it was said, the mafia controlled the sex trade. Red light. American soldiers were off limits to the sex workers, and vice versa. The women lounged and catwalked in lingerie behind street-to-ceiling plate glass windows. Read more…
REO Speedwagon carried us around the skating rink in perpetual left turns. Our own version of a flat NASCAR track in a dim, windowless building that once had been a service station situated along the highway south of town. In the corner booth playing DJ was the old man who Read more…
The most satisfying meal I ever ate was while alone on a bed in a rented room in the speck of a nation called Andorra. I was a hungry 28-year-old backpacker a month or more deep into a summer in Europe. I’d maxed out my graduate school loans to cover Read more…
A wooden Louisville Slugger stands in the corner next to my family’s front door. Black electrical tape wraps much of the bat’s handle. And then some. It squeezes tight a hairline that fissured during batting practice with my dad one day. I was, I don’t know, eight years old? Ten? Read more…
There was a sprawling tree of essential importance in the yard of my childhood. It stood in the crook of the northeast elbow of our yard. The grasses of the back and side yards blended there. It was a climbing tree. It also was a spectator tree at times, standing Read more…
I was baptized at eight years old. I was old enough to know wrong from right, I was told, and to make that commitment to God of my own grown-up volition. It felt like a big day. To my parents. They seemed pleased with me, anyway. The youngest of their Read more…
My parents do not drink. At all. Never did. I had my first drink at age five, maybe six. Whiskey. Neat. Even though my parents did not drink at all. Or was it somehow because of it? Or because it was so condemned, so vilified as to give it an Read more…
Anne Lamott talks of being a Sunday school teacher at a failing church. The context for this description seems to be, or at least include, the fact of low prayer turnout. She talked on Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast of teaching Sunday school to two nine-year-olds and two teenagers in Read more…
In the house of my youth, flatulence did not exist. Farts. The natural biological process of releasing gas from the body was a source of embarrassment, shame. Farts were not heard or acknowledged. The bathroom was, presumably, the acceptable place to release the pressures of it all. Privately. Otherwise, they Read more…
The decisive moment of truth came while I was freefalling toward Earth at 120 miles per hour and my parachute was not opening. I was 23 years old and had, perhaps flippantly, answered my mother’s concern about my penchant for diving out of airplanes with something to this effect, “If Read more…
My first weekend in college, I swam across a local lake with one of my new mates from the basketball team. It was and still is the only time I’ve swam across a lake. From the beach to the floating dock on the opposite shore. Two 18-year-old males showing off Read more…
I started pushing a powered lawn mower at age 11. It was nearly autumn in northern Missouri and the mowing season was winding to a close. The next summer, around the time I’d cross my twelfth birthday, I took over my family’s mowing business. Which is to say, I’d start Read more…
I am of the last generation to experience childhood in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era of human existence. Let’s think about that. All the what and who and years that came before. Uncountable and unfathomable, really. And the mere few decades, not even a blink of the universe’s eye, that Read more…
The span of my outstretched arms was wider than my room at the White House Hotel. Already, you can see that “room” and “hotel” are generous descriptors. It was a flophouse on the notorious Bowery in NYC at a time when few of those havens remained. A four-story red-brick building Read more…