This in memory of Peggy Rabb, who I knew only a little and a little while, but who was all kindness to me. In our first conversation we talked about things I have written and things she has written and writers we know, and she told me where she would be buried, and she spoke …
I read once that the historian’s admiration for authority affects his assessments of civilizations past — that oppressive regimes, with their monuments to state power, will draw his eye and his imagination more readily than a nation of citizen farmers. That’s probably true for most people; we can’t help but watch the parade’s prancing exhibition of the …
He sees her as we circle the parking lot a second time, an aimless, wandering circle, a time-killing circle while we wait for their mother to finish a bit of shopping. I have already seen the woman — a girl, really, with tangled dark hair and downturned gaze. She sits on a little concrete median …
So, today’s my birthday. (Cue Beatles.) It might be an ill omen that Wife and the youngsters sat me down this morning so I could open one of my gifts, and I broke it within fifteen seconds. It was pretty nifty, though. The gift from my office manager was not breakable — a handy Starbucks …
Yesterday morning Isaiah came to our bedroom, enacting his self-appointed role as Mr. Rise and Shine. He stepped on our knees and ankles and flopped about with sharp elbows until he staked a position between us. Isaac followed. Wife rose to roust the rest of the household and begin her daily routine of re-establishing the …
Wife tells me that when baby Isaiah went for his two year-old check-up this week, the doctor announced that he was to receive two shots. “Two shots!” Isaiah shouted with glee. “Two shots!” Either he thought he was going to play guns with his brothers, or he believed shots is a new kind of candy. …
You’re screaming down the highway late getting to something or away from something, and you know this is the perfect time to make those phone calls you’ve been putting off, the ones to people who want things from you, and not even from you, because you are just a vessel or an obstacle to them, …
The thunder seemed to circle around us in the early morning gray, booming and rattling the pictures on our walls. Isaac and Baby Isaiah came to our room. Isaiah has a big-boy bed now, but his favorite bed remains whatever bed Isaac happens to be sleeping in. Apparently the thunder frightened him into his brother’s …
Sometimes the words don’t seem like they’ll get close to the truth of anything, and so I just stop writing. That’s not completely true; I’ll write fiction perhaps, because those people in the stories inside my head haven’t yet worked themselves into corners where the words are like sunfaded fabric or covered-over grass or the sigh …
You yearn for a holy place because, in the time between waking unable to recall where you are, and drifting again into the half-sleep that is all you’ve known for the longest time, you stand in the darkness of your sterile hotel room, peering into a mirror to see that you are nothing like what …
The Columbine killers, a new book says, weren’t twisted little psychopaths who intended to kill dozens. They were one twisted little psychopath and his pathetic sidekick, and they hoped to kill hundreds. But otherwise they were regular kids. USA Today reports this as if it’s news, though the article is strikingly similar to Slate‘s breakdown in 2004. …
This weekend I lived at beautiful St. Fidelis Church, situated unexpectedly on the Kansas plains. Oddly enough, I never went inside the church proper, but I’m told there’s a large mural behind the altar, of Fidelis being butchered by Calvinists. It made me wonder how many people have been dispatched to the merciful arms of God …
Recently we all saw the horrific murders at a Belgian nursery. Now there are reports that the young killer made himself up in a fashion eerily similar to Heath Ledger’s Joker, and was obsessed with horror movies. Cultured people will cluck their tongues at such associations, however, because everyone knows movies and music and other …
Andy Crouch offers a thoughtful essay on the eventual fruits we might, if we are lucky enough not to find an easy way out, glean from the current economic crisis. Here’s an excerpt: “The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world—and not just the ‘Third World,’ because Canada and …
What would make you remember, if you didn’t know the date, if you had been so crazy during all of it that the calendar became an alien language, like small talk and plans for the future, would be the slant of sunlight. When winter approaches the earth tilts, and one morning the sun caresses everything …
I was afraid of losing our first child, even when she was healthy and near, even before we lost her. I suppose it’s natural to fear for them the way we do. It’s why we grit our teeth and force a smile when they wave to us from slippery stones in the middle of the …
I had business in Las Vegas the last couple of days. Las Vegas is probably my least favorite city. The conference I attended was lodged in Harrah’s, which meant that no matter where I wanted to go, I had to wade through rows and rows of slot machines, colonies of Keno players, and other assemblages …
From Walker Percy’s 1957 article, “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry”: “We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer, a sexual partner, an ‘other-directed’ executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of movie film, years of TV time; that such a man has …
One of last week’s nights I woke to what I thought was a child crying outside our house. This is one of my fears, that my child will wander out the door in the middle of the night and walk away, more lost with each stumbling step, and I will sleep even as he calls …
If you’ve ever had people put their hands on your head and shoulders and pray over you, then you know what it is like, sometimes, to read the words some of you write to me. Caleb has been reading a great many history books. Last night he asked if I have ever been beaten with …
Sunday night brought a nightmare, one I used to have as a child. In this nightmare you are awake, it seems, and you can see the bedroom as it will be when you finally do scream or gasp yourself from sleep: black and gray shadows, the soft frail light of the moon or perhaps a …
I’ve realized lately that my patience with bureaucracy and hypocrisy and politics has nearly reached its limit, which is unusual for me. I like to think that as a student of organizations I have more patience with them. But as I lay in bed yesterday morning, wishing it was Saturday instead of Thursday, pondering the …
I realized, as I lay in bed at 2:30 a.m., my head splitting, wondering if I needed to take my feverish wife to the hospital, that I haggle with God. I don’t know if God haggles back. This makes me a bad Presbyterian, that I don’t hurry past those passages in the Bible about Moses …
The word home has a connotation both immediate and distant. A home is intimate, that place where we belong, where they let us in the door whether we deserve it or not. As something one does, home has traditionally been distant, implying that one is going to it, or that one is being remotely guided …
Father’s Day morning, the Wife brought me homemade blueberry muffins in bed. I sat reading short stories and eating blueberry muffins, and it was blissful. Soon I heard them conspiring outside my bedroom door, the little ones and their mother the ringleader. In marched a little troupe of celebrants, each bearing a gift. They perched …
We’ve been adopted by a kitten. She’s a scrawny black creature who darted out of the bushes a few days ago, mewling and shivering, afraid of all of us but desperately hungry. Now we have a dish for food and water which the boys keep full. The kitten stays mostly in the thick bushes beneath …
Caleb is learning to play chess. I realized this weekend that he often thinks three moves ahead. I will not lose to a seven-year-old. I played in a tournament once, and lost to a fourteen-year-old. That was humiliating enough. The first time I realized there are people smarter than me — people who simply have …
The two younger boys crept into our bed in the black morning, driven by a snarling storm. They curled into me, shivering, as if I am a safe harbor. There is no keeping out the storm; this is what I thought. The cool peaceful evenings line themselves up between the vibrant days, and we forget …
She would have been eleven today. I would have made her favorite meal, which is spaghetti, and we would have had cake, probably something with pink frosting, and I would have eaten a slice even though I gave up sugar for Lent, because if God understands anything about us, he understands this. I would have …
