Jem had to write an essay answering the question: What is the best form of government? Most of his classmates picked one and argued for its merits. Jem said something different: No form of government is good or bad. Its goodness or badness depends on the people within it. Please discuss.
The other adults in the family unit took the kids to a cabin up north over the recent school break. The cabin was decorated with seasonal and state-related geegaws and notions and faux-stamped signs–about bears and moose and lobsters and skiing and so on. Willa made a list of the signs; there were around 20. […]
My kids were recalling a sign they once saw at a birthday party, or perhaps a country fair. The sign was a list of events happening at the party/fair that day. At 1:30, the event was: “Muffin the Clown begins to roam.” Which they have never forgotten.
At dinner one night I was talking with my 10-year-old son, we must have been talking about myths, he’s been in a myth phase for a couple of years, Greek and Roman and Norse and Egyptian, and this must have led us to compare myths to contemporary religion, and then to science, and he said […]
I was talking with a friend who lives on a lovely plot of land way outside of town, her driveway is a dirt road at least a mile long, halfway into it you’re sure you’ve taken the wrong road, but the point is that she and her husband can wake up in the morning and […]
Yesterday I was walking in town, and the air was frigid and the wind was stinging, and I was reminded of the times when I lived in Chicago, the coldest place I’ve ever lived, and although I am not known around town as a guy who talks aloud when wandering the streets alone, I found […]
I was walking around a small town in Maine, and I passed a couple–a man and a woman–in their 20s, talking on the grounds of a brick-faced Customs House. It was in fact a museum, closed for the day, with a short brick walkway, a fair amount of lawn, and knee-high wrought-iron fencing. They were […]
The other day I sent my kids to the farmers’ market, and they came back with a little container of honey on the comb. Have you ever had honey on the comb? I had not. Nor had I understood that bee’s wax is, like, wax that bees make. They make wax! Little (or large?) catacombs […]
James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. 1963. “People are not terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find […]
The artist formerly known as my wife is the poet laureate of our town. A little while ago she hosted an event that featured a bunch of people reading poems by other people. And she added a wrinkle: during the course of the reading, audience members were to write down lines that caught their attention. […]