I felt it again, like clockwork, with the first snow. The snow was only a dusting, not even an inch, but I still thought of Dad. His pleasure in loading the plow onto the front of our car. The delight…
He just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes… It’s been a while since I’ve heard anyone say it, even as a joke. The echo of a father who slipped out the door and never came home. The legacy of…
“When I was a schoolboy my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals ‘THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT – UNEXPLORED.’” —…
The first time I picked up a cigarette, I was probably six years old. It was late morning, mid-summer, and the babysitter had let us kids out into the park next to her home while she returned inside to begin…
Either you learn to love baseball as a kid or else you don’t learn to love it. Right? It’s just too big. It’s like any other behemoth cultural institution—Catholicism, for example. I can speak to this as a Catholic. That…
The oldest surviving map of the world—the Babylonian Imago Mundi—circumscribes a landmass between the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The world it describes is only as long as the Euphrates River. At its center lies the city of Babylon. To the…
When I lived in South Dakota, one of my favorite places was a truck stop on the western edge of Rapid City. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this truck stop—except…maybe, for the quality of the pie in its diner.…
Author’s Note: Last issue, we published “Part One” of this two-part essay. Part One provided the backstory for a very particular time and a place–Yosemite Valley at Christmas, 1943. Photographer Ansel Adams lived and worked in the Valley, and he…
When the Nazis fell in Yugoslavia, the regime that took its place was Tito’s Communist government. While it had some separation from the central USSR rule, life in communist Yugoslavia was a struggle. And Nick’s experiences in other countries as a soldier showed him that life could be different. He decided to leave Yugoslavia by any means necessary.
There’s little doubt that we live today in interesting times. In recent months, Americans have been confronted with deep, seemingly insurmountable problems. Divisions among neighbors and families. The pain of economic loss and the specter of illness and death. We’ve…