Story Time

My daughter Frances loves stories. She can’t get enough of them. Brushing teeth, dressing, out on walks, on the subway, putting on pajamas, going to bed—she wants to hear a story.

I’m losing track of my own cast of characters. Once, maybe a year ago, I tried telling Frances a bedtime story. It was about Kelly, my old dog when I was a child. I think in that story Kelly might have climbed a tree to rescue an injured bird. I’m not sure. I can’t remember.

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Go East, Young Man

Kate and the kids and I flew to Seattle last week on vacation. Flights west always trace the same emotional arc for me. Endless green (white in winter) of the East and Midwest suddenly give way to mountains (Rockies), blond desert, mountains again (Sierras, Cascades). My heart gradually lightens and opens. I’m back West. I’m home.

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Play It

If I ever leave New York one memory will burn in my mind. It’s an October night, cool and clear. I climb from the 66th Street subway station, cross Broadway and leap up a flight of shallow steps. I’m in the courtyard of Lincoln Center. The Metropolitan Opera House is lit up like a jewel box. A fountain leaps and hisses. Someone’s waiting beside the fountain. It’s Kate. She looks lovely. We’re meeting after work to go to the symphony. We’re newly married, just moved to the city, and on this night everything is perfect and perfectly wonderful.

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Snow Day!

It snowed and snowed. Flakes blew past our windows in erratic horizontal streams. The trees in the churchyard bowed with white. It was early morning and already the city was blanketed.

Frances and I got out the door as quickly as we could. I knew the storm would only increase and I was working at home—story to finish, phone interview after lunch—so it was now or never. Frances is three. It’s never a good idea to keep her inside all day. Even she knows this. “Daddy, I have too much energy!” she sometimes wails.

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Cold Comfort

When do you chafe at winter? Is it after the holidays when the lights come down and the deep dark settles in? Or is it April when a late snowstorm pronounces “Hah!” on your dreams of spring?

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A Walk in the Park

We were cooped up. Winter cold outside, two young kids inside. We groused, missing the outdoor life we left behind long ago in California. It’s January in New York City. Everything’s brown, gray and dirty. And it was raining.

So we made a plan. Monday morning, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we rousted ourselves early and got the kids up. “We’re going for a walk,” we told Frances, our three-year-old. We told Benjamin, too, but he fell asleep the moment he landed in the front carrier. He’s three months.

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In the Heights

I’m yearning for mountains. It’s inarticulate, a wash of images. I think of past trips to the high country, almost all in the Sierra Nevada in California.

Cerulean blue sky. Dusty green Jeffrey pines. Rust red bark smelling of vanilla. Blond trails the color of beach sand. A gentle summer wind blowing off sculpted granite peaks. In harsh sun granite glows like a beacon. At day’s end it blushes, solidifies, then disappears. Stars burn.

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The Still, Small Voice

I’ve been up at night these days. My son Benjamin is seven weeks old and he awakens reliably at around two each morning to eat. Kate feeds him and I rock him back to sleep if he needs it.

Life goes on as normal but it’s those times rocking I remember. They’re like stones in a river, unmoving while all around rushes and tumbles.

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Practice Makes Perfect

What do you think of this quote?

“Men invent means and methods of coming at God's love, they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God's presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?”

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Ten Things

Ten things I noticed on my way to work this morning:

1. The sky heavy with approaching rain, gray and moist, tasting of the sea.

2. A solitary yellow leaf drifting to the sidewalk on Broadway near my subway station at 96th Street. The leaf fluttered and swooped like a swallow.

3. Passengers swaying like sea grass on my packed subway car.

4. Streaks of orange—local train tracks outside the window of my express train reflecting the subway tunnel’s sulfurous light. I thought of car headlights in an overexposed photo, shooting stars.

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