Essays

My freshman English teacher was a shaggy-haired hobbit-poet in horn-rimmed glasses. Most of Bill Brown’s students towered over him, but his sheer exuberance left us gazing up at him in wonder.

I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Every year, when the stresses of the holiday season begin whipping up into frenzy, I weather them by imagining that I’m roaming around the world described in the Dylan Thomas story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: the magic of winter, the mysteries surrounding older family members, and the odd flexes of time when normal schedules are suspended.

The rough-looking man who first plucked me from a basket would later say those who believe dogs have no soul only say that because they lack one of their own. I think maybe I taught him that.

I’ve come to realize that we were but fleeting guests, though the children’s hurried footsteps grooved a worn path down the wooden stairs.

Who am I to deny this nod from the Universe, this spark of divinity made flesh? I took the small miracle and held it in my hands like a caramel sweet enough to hurt my teeth.