Essays

March 5, 2014 Over the years, I had turned to almighty Google to find my childhood friend, but there were too many Peter Watsons out there, perhaps, or perhaps I didn’t try hard enough. One way or another, I never found any footprints pointing toward Nashville, where long ago we were running buddies—not fellow joggers, as that term has come to mean, but boys who ran around together, made mischief, and learned a little something about how the world works.

March 4, 2014 When my family first moved into our home in Wartrace, Tennessee, snakes were a problem. Our land was infested with a wide variety of slitherers, many of which my father and uncles killed, sometimes with guns and hoes, sometimes with tractors, but snakes still found us. They sunned themselves in our driveway, hid in the hedges, and once climbed up our fireplace mantel. I developed a fear of being taken by surprise. But at the Rattlesnake Festival, watching a kingsnake glint in the afternoon light, my only sensation was wonder.

March 3, 2014 Faced with fleshing out the facts, I didn’t immediately think of the guy who tried to run me off the road. I thought of the baby who got me over the ridge. As I wrote, what I remembered of that day was not the fear that was still gripping me. I remembered the innocence that inspired me.

January 23, 2014 As others begin to share their own experiences of moving away from home or of wanting to make a difference, something in my mind clicks: as readers, we are constantly using our own stories to connect to another person. In an English class once, we spoke about the meaning of literature. Why does it exist? Why are we drawn to it? A remark from the professor struck me: “Literature is one person’s attempt to explain what it is like being human.”

June 27, 2013 It’s wonderful to know that one can mean so much to so many in such a small place. Later, looking out the plane window, I think of all the little villages past the lights of Surabaya, each little school just a dot on an island just a dot on the world. So many dots, so much love to offer. Plop a Peace Corps volunteer in the dot and watch the love tumble in.