Redemption

* * * REDEMPTION When I was four years old I knew my phone number. Still remember it to this day. But I don’t remember much of my dad. I don’t remember him saying goodbye, but I wish I could. At least then I’d know for sure he did. I remember fear, falling into a… Read more

My Radiometer

I can’t say how my life would have turned out had it been cloudy the day my fourth grade class visited the Peabody Museum in New Haven Connecticut. I certainly wouldn’t be standing here looking out my kitchen window at a honey locust tree, a trampoline, and a little boy, a world away from where… Read more

Clouds & Dreams

Yesterday the clouds were a line of bunnies running with a birthday cake. Lately, Noodle exercises his eyes, notices distances, and writes fables into the sky. He’s becoming a dreamer. And he’s taken to creating characters and conversations in the creatures and the places we visit. One sunny winter day, we took him to Ambury… Read more

Would You Love Me?

On the car ride back from his cousins’ house, well past bedtime, his face glowing in the pale low-pressure sodium lights outside the turnpike toll plaza, Noodle asked whether we would still love him if he lost a hand. I checked the rearview to see if he was giggling out a cheeky ruse, but he… Read more

Salvation

One of my earliest memories is of my father storming into the downstairs playroom with a stack of records that I loved listening to and snapping them into shards while I cried. As I recall, one of his records had been scratched. I’m not sure if the scratch had been my fault, but that was… Read more

Outsiders

Seems that everybody wants to be at the mercy of something. Whether rules, or limits, or comfort in standards and certainty, I never feel quite right in the company of constraint. Of course I realize that you’ve got to know the rules before you break them — get them in your bones then let them go snap.… Read more

On Staying Awake

Remember that time you met that girl and thought, “I could stay awake with her forever.” Every day is like that for a kid. This occurred to me when Noodle ratcheted up his going-to-bed protests last night. As always, he made any and every excuse he could find to stay up longer. He just had… Read more