When our two eyes meet for the hundredth time in the day, skies outside cloudy, a rolling froth of clouds threatening to boil over, caught in the red rhombus of a televised tornado warning area, something happens that was unlike the first ninety-nine. We are pulled...
Ancients studied celestial phenomena in the heavens to chart seasons, determine the best time to plant and harvest crops, wage battles, and hunt animals for food. In the 1950s, the kids in my neighborhood studied the night skies for flying saucers or UFO’s...
He thinks I am my mother. I hear it in his voice. I feel it in the way he fingers my hair. Her hair. I know I look like her. We have the same blue eyes, the same thick flaxen hair. It was comforting, after she died. Looking in the mirror was almost like looking at...
At noon I head out to Beaverton, an unfamiliar suburb on the outskirts of Portland, to teach yet another driving lesson. I need some fun after this morning’s travails, and I get a pleasant break. I have three kids in the car, which can be entertaining if the...
Another instructor, Gilbert Swan, arrived the week after our trip south from Taif to Al Baha. He had taught at King Fahd airbase before, as well as at other locations in Saudi Arabia. He was British, but his liberal politics didn’t mesh with the Thatcher or...
They say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I take out my map and after locating the relevant placemarks, draw a straight line between Holland and Singapore. Apparently, closing the shortest distance between us requires me to swim a large...
