The other day I received an email from a former student. This is unusual. Most emails from students are from current students, not former ones—students who are attaching paper submissions or requesting paper deadline extensions or making excuses for unwritten papers. Funny word to describe pieces of writing—”papers.” In the abstract, [...]
This evening my friend Matt came over with the supplies for our latest brew: a vey pale IPA, hearty and golden, light but complex, the culmination of all our brewing experience to date. Only, we’ve let a few months lapse between this and our last brew session, and somehow neglected to stock up on [...]
Tuesdays I wake up early and commute forty-five minutes to the high school, where I teach all day. From there I commute fifty more minutes to the community college, where I hold office hours and conduct an evening class. I usually don’t mind all the driving—the roads run through forests and past cornfields, [...]
It’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m getting ready to leave when I hear from upstairs Nora’s bare feet running in soft staccato steps across the floor. Her descent down the staircase is trochaic—thump-thump—the right leg landing hard, bearing the small heft of her body while the left leg follows. Then she [...]
I’ve been reading Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, a collection of interlocking short stories about the residents of a small Maine town. I am nearly finished with it, which, for a several reasons, is somewhat remarkable.
It’s not on the curriculum for any of the courses I teach. The last few years, it’s developed that [...]
Today was pleasant and collegial, and I enjoyed the inventive hors d’oeuvres my colleagues brought to the book club meeting, and I found our discussion of Olive Kittridge quite agreeable, perhaps even too agreeable: one craves a sharp critical retort now and then. But I was the first one to speak, and everyone agreed [...]
Nicole and I had a “date night” tonight, which is for married people a painfully cute term for something that should be easier to do when you’re living together than it is when you’re, you know, merely dating. We discussed this and concluded that our children are to blame. If it weren’t for [...]
So I woke up this morning and saw the headlines: House Passes Health Care Reform. And of course that’s not the end of reform, the political process is long and unwieldy, but still, it was a happy start to my day. I made breakfast: bacon sizzling in the frying pan, fluffy pancakes, fresh [...]
Yesterday Nora and Mason were playing one of those games in which the rules evolve constantly, such that the game, whatever it might finally have been, never occurs: it’s all negotiation and compromise and stalemate. At some point Mason must have violated some childhood rule of diplomacy, and Nora flung herself on the floor [...]
A friend of ours says that when Nora talks, it sounds like she’s underwater.
Maybe.
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The man on my doorstep wants to know if I’m aware that God has an active organization in use on Earth today. I’ve already revealed myself to be an agnostic, which to the man means I have both an open mind and a fear of commitment. He shows me a verse in the [...]
Today, a guy driving a van ran me into oncoming traffic when he swerved into my lane. He didn’t see me. He was on a cell phone.
This evening, a student dropped my course because she’s been in too much pain since she was in a car accident several weeks ago. The driver [...]
A while ago Nicole and I purchased some apple cider at a farm stand and later that week we made hot cider. Turns out we’ve had, for who knows how long, this green box of mulling spices in the pantry, wedged between boxes of tea bags. Since we married eight years ago, Nicole [...]
Today the children had an ice cream hangover, and I had a children hangover, so it was with much relief that I left for my usual Saturday getaway at the library. I was productive until the last twenty minutes, when I found myself looking at photos of authors on the jackets of their hardcovers. [...]
Henry at twelve years old cannot fail noticing that, unlike his brothers, he has no innate talent or aptitude; nor does he have, despite the assurances of his guidance counselor, “hidden potential.” He is bulky, he sweats through his shirts, he has a soft mouth and pale freckles, and his predilections are still those [...]
… the letter M, the number 6, a styrofoam cup of gas station coffee, disgruntled union shop talk, the fragile relationship between law and equality, three detentions, capricious copy machines, Dostoevsky, an anecdote about Billy Collins’s disappointingly weak handshake, NPR podcasts, aqua-colored bottle-caps, an assortment of IPAs, children in various stages of anxiety and excitement, [...]
Yesterday my friend Matt and I bottled our MacGyver Indian Pale Ale. We should probably come up with another name for it, something more indirectly and cunningly allusive … but no, I think MacGyver it is. The theme of last-minute improvisation continued when, using nothing but a (sanitized) hair tie and a mesh [...]
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I read, write, teach, take photographs, brew beer, grow tomatoes, and make pretty good grilled cheese sandwiches. Want to know more?
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