Essays

After the brokenness of life in 2020, our overseas trip is a do-over of sorts — an effort to capture what eluded us that dismal spring, a celebratory sense of moving forward with optimism.

We came there in the spring of 1963. Our house stood alone in the newly subdivided farmlands south of Nashville. Its only companions were scattered foundations representing the future homes of families whose lives we would share for years.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The experience of holding an infant bear in your arms, and feeling it snuggle under your coat for warmth, is unforgettable.

Antiques Roadshow, the PBS TV series that for 25 years has revealed the history and occasionally breathtaking value of collectibles was coming to Nashville, and I had tickets. From there to stardom seemed what Bertie Wooster would have called a stone-dead cert, if ever there was one.

Medics flung open the cargo doors and deposited an Iraqi man whose drawn and lined face exposed a life well acquainted with war and hardship. Shouted instructions to “Get him to Balad!” — the site of the big American trauma hospital — sent us on our way.

FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The Celts believed heaven and earth are three feet apart but even shorter in these thin places. Are such locations where we’re able to brush up against the divine? Sometimes writing feels to me like a brush with the divine. Maybe that’s why places like Rugby call out to those of us who write, putting stories into our heads and almost demanding that we set them down on paper.