Hot town, summer in the city / Back of my neck getting burnt and gritty… goes the ode by The Lovin’ Spoonful, a radio staple at this time of year, its fevered melody symptomatic of the swelter it evokes: All around, people looking half dead / Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head… And that’s just the state of things above ground. Go below it, though, in New York City no less, and only a dirge will do:... Read more
All of the dollars and expertise that produced The Avengers, Men in Black 3, and the rest of this summer’s block-busting movie events could never produce a spectacle as wondrous as eleven-year-old Aran Bell dancing his heart out. Aran is reason enough for you to buy a ticket for First Position. That’s director Bess Kargman’s new documentary about young ballet dancers training to compete in New York’s Youth America Grand Prix. Her cameras roll as the dancers rehearse, and the... Read more
Even if you only saw the trailers for the 2005 film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, you might recall the images of a young girl walking down the sidewalk, haunted by passersby who seem innocent enough until they draw close, when their faces are transmogrified into those of demons. Those trailers scared the crap out of me. Maybe they struck some close-held fear of insanity or possession: for years as a child I suffered from nightly dreams of the same... Read more
My cousin Tom Hardy died three weeks ago in Columbus, Mississippi, less than twenty miles from the plantation on which he’d been born some ninety-three years before. There are many people in a life that we would like to have known—Washington, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee; but such are the things of fancy. There are few that we would like to have known better; such are the things of regret. I knew Tom; I would like to have known him better.... Read more
I woke at one thirty with a start. My heart pounded in my ears. My wife was warm under the covers beside me, in the heavy rhythm of sleep. Through the hiss of the white noise machine I could hear the wet clicks of our schipperke, Sgt. Pepper, under the bed obsessively licking his paw. I was afraid. I did my quick mental inventory. Everything was as it should be. Kids in bed. Doors locked. (more…) Read more
My heirloom cookbook was born during a Washington D.C. snowstorm in February of what was then called “The Year 2000,” in my final months of singlehood before I was to be married in July. That storm barely registers in the city’s memory now: it was neither the Blizzard of 1996, with its eight-foot-high snowbanks, 2003’s freak President’s Day storm, nor was it the incomparable Snowmageddon of 2010 (which I wrote about on Good Letters). However, the storm in 2000 was... Read more
For my forty-first birthday, I decided to write a personal rule of life. Turning forty hadn’t magically made me wise in the way that translates into action, and I didn’t wish to spend the next decade wading in the same bog of issues and habits and disordered affections that kept me from feeling present to my thirties. I gathered some resources, ranging from the Rule of St. Benedict to works by some of my favorite contemporary spiritual writers like Paula... Read more
One of the toughest and most important jobs I have as an English professor at a small, women’s liberal arts college, is teaching students to write well. I would love to hold forth on Flannery O’Connor—my life-long literary crush—but getting students to care about writing involves helping them find something they’re interested in, not foisting my predilections upon them. My job in first semester English composition is to make sure students know how to write a thesis-driven essay that draws... Read more
“Prayer…is always available to us.” –St. Seraphim of Sarov I I sit atop my red metal bunk bed, thumbing through the orange, vinyl-bound pocket Bible that I received at a friend’s Vacation Bible School party. The next morning, I have an appointment with the doctor, who will examine a cyst on my left breast. I am ten years old, and my mother cannot tell me what the cyst is. On my bed, the ceiling light spins in a crooked circle... Read more
In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a shining word, into the inner chamber of the other. It is to ask the father and mother to return and be forgiven. But in this religion not everyone can pray –Galway Kinnell, “The Man on the Hotel Room Bed” “I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.” –John... Read more
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