Every winter I plunge into darkness. As Seattle days shorten to eight hours with clouds covering most of the sky and the city readies for ten months of showers, my inner world becomes as bleak as the world outside. I burrow through three seasons like a shrew mole through the mud, tunneling deeper to cry, surfacing only to complain. Born and raised in New York, I’ve not adjusted in twenty-seven years. I suppose this isn’t surprising. All my grandparents were... Read more
Last week I went and watched my son graduate from Virginia Boys State. After the ceremony, I waited through waves of boys in identical white shirts and blue shorts for him to emerge, and when he did, his shoulders were slouched and his eyes tired. In the car I asked him, “How’d it go?” He shrugged. “Did you have a good time?” “No.” “Did you learn anything?” “No.” “Nothing at all?” He said no, he hadn’t learned anything. I kept... Read more
Until I was thirty-two, I was afraid to think about God. I panicked at what I called “ultimate questions.” In my journal when I was twenty-nine, I wrote: “Life-and-death is the only real drama. But I’m afraid to get close to it.” Yet I’d keep begging my husband George, teasingly, to “tell me the meaning of life.” It was one of the playful routines of the first six years or so of our marriage. We’d giggle at his lack of... Read more
If you were to live a day as though you’d be dead at the end of it, you’d be a better person. That’s a trope that’s as true in the saying as it is rare in the realizing. It’s impossible to know what’s coming, to know how many hours, if not seconds, we have left. So we go about living each day by way of a much more outrageous artifice: that the end of the sun will be followed by... Read more
Just about every morning for the eight-plus years we’ve lived in our house, the day arrives with the light of sunrise spilling over the head of our bed. And just about every morning, whether scrambling to get the children to school or in my nightgown working, , I’ve marked the time between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. when a big green pickup truck passed in front of my house, morning sun flashing from the windshield. “There’s Linda,” my husband would say.... Read more
What came before “there was evening and there was morning, a first day,” and “there was evening and there was morning, a second day,” and “there was evening and there was morning, a third day,” and so on until “the heaven and earth were finished” and God “ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done,” and “God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy”? In other words, what came before numbering our days, one... Read more
The exodus (small “e”) was a family of five fleeing the New York summer in our Volvo wagon just last week. Crossing the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge, a veritable wall of water reared up on either side of us in the gray-out of a rainstorm indistinguishable from the river below. Naturally, this was followed by bumper-to-bumper traffic on the FDR, a seeming pile-up of similar-minded refugees, enemy chariots, or both. All in the effort—in our case, at least—to... Read more
Guest Post By Elizabeth Kalman My house sits on the edge of a salt marsh in Charleston, South Carolina. On one side of the house is the street, on the other, the marsh, teeming with life. I have a fence between my yard and the marsh, but the crabs, snakes, rats, and cockroaches all ignore it. The Night herons, in particular, use the fence as a perching place before they hop down and crap on my deck. The bank is... Read more
“One must have faith and pray; the water will have no virtue without faith.” –St. Bernadette My daughter just finished a week at our local Catholic school’s day camp. She came home with a crèche she made from a shoebox, a St. Brigid’s cross of pipe cleaners, and a plastic bottle of holy water, blessed by the deacon. “It’s not from Lourdes,” the catechist told us, apologetically. For Catholics, the spring at Lourdes—dug by the bare hands of St. Bernadette... Read more
As he is evacuated from a battle zone, Chris Taylor—Oliver Stone’s protagonist in Platoon—marches us through What It All Means. Only minutes before, Stone the director exploded Stone the actor playing an embattled camp commander—using a suicide bomber, no less. There might be dullards in the audience, however, so Taylor explains that we are at war with ourselves. On Taylor’s head is the bandana of the movie’s Christ figure, juxtaposed with facial wounds that approximate the scars of its demonic... Read more
Good Letters
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