Postcard From Paris
This spring, I returned to Paris for the first time — with almost two decades of marriage, three kids, a freshly minted technical college diploma, and a new career in construction under my belt. The city looked very different.
Essays
The Homeplace on the Plaza
The Southern Festival of Books is the place I came from and the place I return to, and it is the place where my literary forebears live on through the miraculous immortality of books.
Reading My Bookcase
My unread books had all survived several cullings, which meant that I must have repeatedly decided they were worth reading. So it seemed time to do just that.
Far Out
I happened to be at an afternoon performance under the tent on July 20, 1969, when the conductor suddenly halted the orchestra in mid-flight, turned to the audience, and shouted in a joyful voice, “I’ve just been informed that the Americans have landed on the moon!” Then he turned to the orchestra and whipped it into the Star-Spangled Banner.
Dark Lantern
What I saw was not a dusty old book but a boy in a wheelchair by a window in a ramshackle house farther east in Tennessee—two hours away, on the Cumberland Plateau near Crossville.
Highway Baptism
Two cowboys in a Ford Ranchero pickup truck stop and tell me I can ride thirty miles to Missoula in the truck’s back bed. There have been no cars for nearly an hour. I think for a nanosecond. Then I take the ride.
