Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages
Stage 1: Fear The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the...
Julio At Large
I hadn’t known the girl very well, and rarely gave her much thought before she disappeared the summer between ninth and tenth grade, when my family lived in Buckhannon, West Virginia. We both had last names that started with the letter “B,” so we frequently had to sit next to each other in classes where...
Tuesday Evening at the Rue de Fleurus
Evening drops into the courtyard like a black cat lowering its back. A muted clink of dinner spoons spills from open windows into the courtyard, where the concierge’s dog yips en francais at a pair of American tourists who have found their way to 27 rue de Fleurus. I sit and smoke a cigarette between...
Knock, Knock
London Bridge is falling down, Falling down, falling down, London bridge is falling down, My fair lady. He’s been falling asleep a lot lately, I tell my mother over the phone, the receiver cupped under my chin; she is the one who still holds me. He keeps falling asleep on the toilet, I say as...
Somebody Else’s Genocide
After my reading in Atlanta, Georgia, a blond woman asked me, in German-accented English, if my books were translated and published in Germany. “Ja,” I said. I studied German for two years in high school and one semester in college, but I remembered only a few words—abgehetzt, schoner, arschloch—and only one phrase: Ich habe sieben...
WQED, Channel 13: Programming Guide
6:40 a.m. Sesame Street You have finally fallen deeply asleep after getting up to go to the bathroom—for the third time—at 5:00 a.m. Your son approaches silently, pats you on the head. His hand, fingers splayed, fits into your palm. His patting is gentle and inexorable. You stayed up too late reading a New Yorker...
The Potato Harvest
This is the morning that summer ends. In one hard frost our garden has become an abandoned battlefield, the last vestiges of the living lay stiff and frozen, black wilted zucchini leaves like limp umbrellas stand as pathetic monuments, tattered flags, over what was, only yesterday, a vegetable garden. Potatoes love one heavy frost. It...
Sketch
I notice the guy sketching even before I sit down, but it’s not a strategic decision at all. When I have a choice I try to sit facing the eye candy, and this guy’s not even close to handsome. But it’s the only available chair in the coffee shop, so I end up facing the...
Tenderness
Ronnie Thomley banged on our door early one morning. He runs heavy machinery for Willie Thrift, the pond man. He showed up at our place in the pine woods of panhandle Florida driving a compact air-conditioned tractor equipped with a front-loaded rotary cutter. Ronnie’s boss had sent him over to clear out some of the...
Tiny Masters: An Artful Trick to Writing the Personal Essay
We’ve gone around the table introducing ourselves, and now comes the awkward moment when I sound a bit like a door-to-door salesman peddling an unfamiliar doohickey that costs too much and nobody really needs anyway. “What is a personal essay?” I’ll begin. Students start shifting uneasily in their seats. It’s that word, essay. So scholarly,...
Private Bath
For example, when we were at that chic old B&B in Kensington, I had to wrap my slippery thin traveling robe around me and head down the hall past the half-dozen other rooms, hoping to God no one was in the bathroom during my morning window of personal opportunity. If we happened not to leave...
Daily Constitutionals
I’ve had some lovely walks along the Spokane River trail and in nearby state parks, but on such hikes, a walker must keep constant vigilance over the feet and all that could trip them up: the skateboarders, the rocks and roots and chuck holes. So for my daily constitutionals, I most prefer the quiet side...
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