A Hanukkah Story
We’ve talked about karma before. I tend to be a pretty grounded person from day to day, but as I’ve written elsewhere, I also find that sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is to give in to wonder. And so it was last night. My father was Jewish. But I was raised by my mother, who for much of her life was a member of the Episcopal Church. My concept and experience of Jewish tradition came mostly from books and movies. Karen and I tried lighting Hanukkah candles with our kids a handful of times, but it didn’t really...
Read MoreA Series of Moments
Life is a series of moments. The moment you took your first step. The moment you fell and split your chin open. The moment you landed a job that filled you with purpose and confidence. The moment you had to say goodbye to someone you loved. That defining moment when you pushed yourself to do the very difficult thing that your heart was telling you was right. Life is made up of moments like these, and I’ve lived a lot of them this year. The year began with Karen and I finishing the final clean-out of the house my mother...
Read MoreLegacy
“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us, and make us kinder. You always have the choice.” – the Dalai Lama My father passed away yesterday, slipping free of his body in the early evening of a day that had begun with Karen and I and Dad’s faithful caregiver Hilda gathered around his bed, telling stories, sharing laughter through our tears as he slept peacefully between us. Dad was 95 and lived a remarkable life, from military service in World War II and...
Read MoreThe Box
The box has sat on the bottom shelf of one of four tall bookshelves in my office at work for almost exactly 10 years now. It’s a standard-issue banker’s box, white with black lettering and holes at either end for handles, a bit worn in places, nothing remarkable about it other than its simple presence in a space that’s otherwise filled with the tools of my trade: institutional publications, books on writing, and promotional collateral talking up the academic programs of the graduate school that has been my professional home for over a decade now. The box is empty. I've...
Read MoreOhana
In the Hawaiian tradition, ohana is a word that straddles and blurs the line between family and community. Your ohana is your intentional family, the people gathered around you who love and support you, whether connected by blood or chosen bonds of trust and affection. Last week on the side of a mountain on Hawaii’s Big Island, several of us toiled to finish the job of cleaning out my mother’s house for the final time, preparing it to be handed over to its new owners. The job was substantial—Mom had lived there 35 years—and inevitably bittersweet. It was time, and...
Read MoreNames and Places
In my fiction writing I typically invest almost as many hours choosing the names of people and places as I do writing about them. These details matter; I’ve always felt that in fiction, names should carry layers of resonance that reflect, reinforce, contradict, or otherwise illuminate aspects of the person or place. This only added to the layers of tingly mirror-universe déjà vu, then, when I recently found myself in a real-life place that shares part of my own name. Before zooming in fully on that moment, though, let’s back the lens off for some important context. In 1962, U.S....
Read MoreA Cosmic Equation
It’s a sensation that never quite leaves you, this feeling that you owe your very existence to someone you will never meet. My older brothers were born in 1950, 1952, and 1954; I trailed the pack by a full eight years, arriving in 1962. People often smile when they hear that sequence, jumping to the obvious conclusion and silently thinking “Oops.” And I usually smile back, because it’s easier than explaining the truth, which is—as is often the case—so much more complicated. My brothers and I had known for years that Mom took the three of them away to visit...
Read MoreFate, Grace, Karma
In Believe in Me, Tim Green ruminates on fate more than once as he explores his own belief system. “I’m nobody’s chess piece,” he declares, before turning around a few dozen pages later to admit that “saying that everything that had happened was simply a random string of events felt like the most irrational argument of all. Reason only gets you so far; sometimes the only logical thing left to do is to give in to wonder.” And while that wasn’t intended as commentary on my own career, it applies; two of the best jobs I’ve ever held have had...
Read MoreBeautiful Soul
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain “Maggie is a ray of sunshine.” Margarita (“Call me Maggie”) is also our local guide for the morning in Porto, the namesake second city of Portugal, and my comment is funny both because the country has been trapped in a weird early-summer vortex of thick mist and drizzle for going on four days now, and...
Read MoreThe Right Question
Five months into grieving the loss of my mother, it’s become clear I’ve been asking myself the wrong question about the process. The question I’ve been asking is “When will it stop hurting?” The answer, I see now, is never. Losing Mom, not being able to talk with her or send her a picture or give her a hug ever again, will always hurt. And that’s as it should be. Losing her is too big for it to be otherwise. It’s not that it will stop hurting. It’s that, with time and effort, it will hurt less, and hurt differently....
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