I’d say it started with a secret —

sometimes

I remember not wanting to call him because I didn’t want to know — I was sitting in the newsroom writing an article about a recent City Council meeting when I noticed Trish staring at the box TV. Trish, who was our office manager, stood frozen in front of the television, which sat on a file cabinet. “A plane is stuck in a building…

In my late teens, I’d lie by my sliding glass door and watch the sparrows come swooping down onto the seeds I dropped for them on the back patio. I’d listen to the fluttering and fall back to when I was a boy, walking out in the cold morning to…

I can understand why some poor communities no longer trust us, liberal Democrats — I live in the Happy Valley. This New England region, also known as the Pioneer Valley, is a liberal bastion pocketed with some of the best universities in the nation. Here, Black Lives Matter signs blossom on front lawns, and Gay Pride Flags swing from front porches. I also live…

The modernist writer taught me how to look forward — and have fun — while reading ‘serious’ literature — When I first read Gertrude Stein, in particular one of her most difficult books,Tender Buttons, I became fixated on finding meaning. Which meant hours of slow reading. Hours of searching etymologies and allusions. Hours of rewriting sentences. Hours of trying to understand what the tone and mood are saying.

The abandoned road was the apotheosis of childhood freedom — Away from our homes and just beyond the woods, we’d hang out on an abandoned road called Apple Lane. I remember the excavated dirt piles from unbuilt houses making a moonscape stretching down the edge of the long pavement-cracked road. In those piles, I can still see skull-sized rocks, bone-white…

My plan was to escape into a hole in the woods — In a patch of woods across the street from my childhood home was a deep pit filled with leaves and chunks of wood. To us children, it was a magical spot, a place of ritual. Maybe it was its seclusion, under a green canopy of oaks. The woods itself was…

91-year-old gives me a whirlwind tour of city parks — Frank Chmura uses his cane to pull down a branch laden with pears in the backyard of his home in Holyoke, Mass. (Patrick O’Connor photo) I was sitting in my car watching my sons at soccer practice when I noticed an old man digging into the soil in front of…