‘In a whole-foods restaurant in Galway, Ireland, a bearded man kept looking at me across the small crowded interior. I bent to my lentils and greens, sipped my bancha tea. Seventeen, my hair still blonde, wearing an Icelandic wool sweater I’d bought in Copenhagen, I was game, and gamy….’ Read more from ‘The Ore of… Read More

‘I raise the vinyl shade and look out the plane window, golden clouds, deep blue sky, the sun in her circle at the top of the world. The light blazes across the darkened plane and the sleeping passengers and I pull the shade closed. On the video monitor our tiny illuminated plane flies over the… Read More

‘Bruce Chatwin is long dead, but I keep coming across his photograph and his writing in old magazines, like postcards delayed and finally delivered when the traveler himself has gone on. Then I found Chatwin’s posthumous book, What Am I Doing Here, his ironic echo from the other side of the Styx. I never met… Read More

‘I never know how long the baby will nap. The time varies, an hour, ninety minutes, three hours. Sometimes the merest creak of the wooden floor and he surfaces from sleep. Other times a dog yowls, a train whistles, the phone rings and he sleeps on and on. I did not know his nap would… Read More

‘The table is our first geometry: square, circle, rectangle, or the pecan oval of my childhood where I am a fixed point beside my sister, across from my brother, with our parents at the head and foot. I did not always sit there. In a photo taken on my second birthday, I am sitting in… Read More