I wasn’t even a good cancer patient. I skipped out on taking my medicine, a lot. You’d think under the dire circumstances of life or death, I’d remember to take my medicine, but the truth is, I often forgot.
Pasadena, California. The Heisman winner stands in the tunnel looking out. He is big for a tailback. Standing 6’1” and a shade over two hundred twenty pounds. His body is an architectural structure. Despite his towering eminence his steps are gentle, humbled...
Inside the pristine valley below me, coyotes drag newborn lambs snatched from adjoining farmsteads, and cattle sink knee-deep in stream-drenched muck. In the woods, next to the bluebells, crawl ropes of poison ivy thick as my wrist. Yesterday, a red fox lay dead on a trail, two large bite marks on its side. Paradise exists in the mind of the simple, yet there’s something to be said for a canopy of maples embracing at their tips, leaves rocking to the sighs of an afternoon breeze.
I got my dream job—social media assistant at DiPaulo’s, the world’s second-largest producer of authentic Italian pasta sauces.
It was a big responsibility. I wrote posts on Facebook and Tumblr and posted pictures of the sauce on Instagram. But most of all, there was Twitter. For Twitter, I created Pauley...
Just before leaving forever, little Jack Morton’s father bought a small red bicycle with removable training wheels and told Jack that the man of the house needed his wheels. His father said this with tears in his eyes and pressed hard whiskers against Jack’s cheek. For this reason, the bicycle was Jack’s favorite possession even before his feet could reach the pedals. Anne, Jack’s mother, thought it was a dumb idea to give a boy an oversized bike...
My wife, Becca, says she was the first one to spot the McCloskey kid washed up on the shore of Franklin Hollow Lake. Ever since spring broke through the stubborn Virginia winter, she’d walked with a group of neighborhood wives in the evening. Twelve, maybe as many as fifteen of them. They walked the two miles around Franklin Hollow Circle, sometimes detouring along the drives that twisted off the road like snakes from Medusa’s head. Neighborhood watch, they called it, and we laughed. They carried weapons with them—Maglites, Little League bats, anything they could find in the garage or attic or basement that might fend off a burglar or vandal. They strapped Nalgene bottles of white wine to their fanny packs...
I always know where I’m going. Except when I don’t. When I’m in New York City I’m neither a local nor a tourist. I’m not the sidewalk nor the person walking on it—I am the seam connecting the two tiles together, unnoticed but essential to stability. I’ve been here enough times to have exhausted all the usual tourist spots: to my dismay Madame Tussauds wax figures haven’t aged at all since I visited them as a kid, the same ferries that take people out to the oxidized Statue of Liberty are still running, and I’ve watched as Ground Zero has been turned into a tourist destination. Despite all of that, I still end up on the uptown train when I should be going downtown more times than I’d like to admit...
I tried being a pool rat only once in my adult life. It lasted five days at the end of a summer season. Every day, when I drove my rig past the city pool, I stared at the sun bouncing off that water. Looked like it could just strip a guy clean of everything. I started bringing my suit with me in the truck, and when I drove through one morning I parked the truck in an abandoned parking lot across the way and went in. And then the next and the next until it was suddenly the end of the season. That fall they built a wall around the pool to replace the chain-link fence there before, and, I never went again...