The story goes that my sister Julia, newly arrived at UC Santa Cruz, was sitting in class on the afternoon of October 17, 1989, when the ground began to tremble. The class was a large lecture class and Julia watched in amazement as dozens of her fellow PhD students jumped up from their seats and ran for the doorways. Believing it was nothing but the rumble...
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I missed a big chunk of first grade because I was laid up with tuberculosis. As a result, by the time I hit second grade I could barely write my name. Everyone else in the class, I noticed, published themselves every chance they got. In blocky letters they scrawled their names across the blackboard, chalked them on the benches in the playground and on the...
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Often our partings are so frequent and casual we don’t even consider the weight of goodbye. Until the bed is empty, the pills and liquid morphine taken to the police station to be destroyed. Easier to comprehend the finality of medicine than the finishing of a human life. Today is my 70th birthday. Today I pass out of the tenuous grip of late middle age....
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The man was dressed in stiff new Carhartt’s, a red flannel shirt and sheepskin vest. At his feet lay a mutt of disputable parentage—part pointer dog, part pit bull, a smattering of Labrador retriever. She lay uncomfortably, which I noticed was due to a bloated belly. Her large brown eyes were misty with cataracts, her soft muzzle tested the air. As I came...
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When I first arrived in town—this town—in 1979, it was a low-built place, home to thirty-thousand people, all of whom seemed to know one another either by blood relation, marriage, or friendship. And romance, of course, for we were overwhelmingly young and romantic. Like many of us, I came to town in order to be closer to the canyon. The canyon always...
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