Autobiography

My first memory of God: I was five or six years old and feverishly rubbing a white crayon into a dark blue piece of construction paper.

The photograph of my mom refuses to leave the auditorium. We jiggle the cords, but she’s still there, twenty feet tall and gazing at the water.

Cloudy skies with a high near fifty degrees. The snow is melting quickly, leaving behind grey-black slush and patches of dead grass: a scene like the bleary-eyed aftermath of a really good party. The sun goes down at 6:01 tonight, and the moon is in its first quarter. We’

Temps in the teens and a light coating of snow, the first I’ve seen this season. Hopefully, there will be more. Tonight the sun sets at 5:22pm. My father died six years ago today. It still feels like it’s only been a year or two, maybe three.

Sunset at 4:28pm, and a new supermoon is on its way. In two weeks, C. and I will load up a truck, stash our stuff in a storage unit, and wander for a while. We’ll log some time in Ohio before spending a few months in London for

A late April snowstorm blew through Ohio last night, quick and heavy, and the sudden shock of snow was a fine addition to my hallucinations while I lay on the couch, gratefully suffering from fever, aches, and chills: the side effects of the second dose of vaccine. A few hours

One thing I hate about my writing is that it often feels bunchy and tight. I want to recover a sense of play, so I’ve decided to find a hobby. Something unrelated to frowning at my sentences. Something I can do for the hell of it. And most importantly,

The first days of the holiday season often remind me that I don’t have the type of family that appears in commercials and television specials. No parents, siblings, or children. Strange how our culture is so committed to a narrow definition of family that leaves most people feeling awful.

As I stood in a superstore parking lot before leaving Ohio, I watched some geese fly south and remembered my parents’ relationship with birds. My mother was a lapsed Catholic who kept the church at a distance. My father never talked about god. Not until the end. But they both

If I hadn’t been absently flipping through an old journal tonight, I might not have remembered that my mom died eleven years ago today. I felt guilty for losing track of the date, as if I’d abandoned my post. But over the years, my observances have drifted towards

What is the power of a first memory? They are such peculiar creatures, these fuzzy impressions and garbled snapshots that teach us how to see the world. I’m pretty sure my first memory is bawling at the mannequin in the opening credits of Happy Days, which led to a

Ohio. Storms today. Maybe it’s because I’m back in the Midwest, but a memory flashed to mind that I haven’t thought about in years. I was six years old and playing with some of the neighborhood kids in a park somewhere south of Chicago. The sky turned

Riffling through my small box of family memories, I came across a folded clipping that said my grandfather’s grandfather was appointed the postmaster of a small town in Michigan in 1905. A crinkled scrap of paper accompanied the newspaper with a note written in an unfamiliar hand: His was

I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by the grey-pink flecks that seemed to dance in the air while I waited for sleep. One night I climbed out of bed to tell my parents that I saw fairies in the corner of the ceiling.

Today is Mother’s Day. There are still so many emotions that I will not or cannot unlock. I planted some tomato seeds in a small pot on my windowsill. This seemed like a decent way to remember the days I spent by her side drinking sun tea while she

Five years ago today, I attended a funeral for my grandmother in the same church where she was baptized in 1918. “Her life was coherent,” said the priest. I did not know her as well as I would have liked, but I know she was tradition personified, a west side

His spirit runs through nearly everything we hear today.

I used to be so shy. There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three. Anything in the thirties was a good day. This new season of self-isolation brings those quiet adolescent days

These days I feel better with the television news playing in the background, even though it’s nothing but nonstop dread and pharmaceutical advertisements. I want mainstream information, the sense of something shared. I find comfort in the illusion of bodies across the nation gathered before the same broadcast rather

One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a sword. This pirate is a landmark in my mind, a mythic figure who haunts my first memories. For decades he stood on a spindly desk

You can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.

Birthday. Maybe it’s an auspicious one: it’s the first time in over 900 years—since 11/11/1111—that the date reads both ways, no matter how you format it. And it’s the 33rd day of the year with 333 more to go. I’d like to

I’m starting this new decade—and this journal—by revisiting the places where the last one began. Strange how a chunk of time takes shape in the mind, those first arbitrary encounters that define a sense of a place or tint a season. When Candy and I arrived in

After my mother died, my father spent his days wandering through discount department stores, fixated on tracking down the correct size, exact model, or shade of color for something he thought he needed, usually a household item for the little apartment he rented after selling the house. Non-slip adhesives for

Grief can arrive on a gust of wind, a glimpse at a calendar, or a half-heard snippet of conversation on the street.

I thought grief would be dignified and monumental like a tower shrouded in mist or quiet days spent weeping in a dim room.

“As our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling,” wrote Arthur Schopenhaur, “so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever postponed death.” The prevention of dying occupies my mind these days, now that my father and I have moved from the bottom of

The Veridian Fingertip Oximeter is a small plastic widget that monitors your blood oxygen level. You can buy one for forty dollars at Radio Shack. Anything between 95 and 100 is healthy. A reading below 90 indicates hypoxemia, an abnormally low level of oxygen that can damage organs over time.