Baron Wormser: Within The Weeping Was Joy
Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid
Richard Feynman: Letter to Arline
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you.
Baron Wormser: The Good Life
It’s plain that the world as we know it is literally choking on its machine- and money-driven complexity.
David Hassler: Intensive Care
Children under the age of fourteen weren’t allowed in the ICU. I was eleven, and my brother was thirteen, but no nurse or doctor was going to stop us from seeing our mother.
Valerie Bacharach: Chaos
There is no word for parents who have lost a child. Our language is chaotic. We are not widowed or orphaned. We are without, we are incomplete.
Patricia Nugent: It Feels Bad
It feels bad that we are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have women’s equality built into its constitution.
Andrea Mazzarino: Children of War
Armed violence has percolated into just about every aspect of this country’s being — from violent video games to still-spiking mass shootings to local police forces armed with weapons of war.
Richard Horan: Notes from Il Campo
It’s carciofi (artichoke) season here in the Eternal City. Everywhere you go, those fat-stemmed, strongly evocative of Bacchus, violet-and-green buds are still-lifing the display tables out in front of every osteria and trattoria from Prati to San Saba.
James Crews: A Few Things I Have Learned
Watching birds will save you on a daily basis—the shaggy barred owl clinging to a pine branch with its deadly claws, eyes lazing in the glaze of a winter morning, head swiveling back and forth.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Embrace the Mess
Women can reject the pressure to maintain spotless homes year-round and focus on what really matters to us.
Matthew J. Parker: The Era of Idiocy
I did over a decade in jails and prisons because a squad of Pence-like puritans felt it immoral of me to get high on anything other than the drooling drunkenness of alcohol, an endeavor not only baldly hypocritical but so too borderline absurd; a worldwide farce manifesting in the militarization of both the cartels and the police, all of which, of course, was and is more great news for arms dealers.
David Hassler: Spaghetti Dinners
I pour Lynn a glass of wine and make a toast: “To our future life together.” We stare into each other’s eyes and smile. Unable to wait any longer, I ask Lynn if she will marry me. She says yes, and I begin to cry. I am here, in this place, with a beautiful woman who loves me.
Rebecca Gordon: Rain and Heat, Fire and Snow
Life in a Destabilized California
