I was a university sophomore in New York City in the fall of 1982. There was a girl in my art history class who stood out as particularly smart, attractive and friendly in the way people are who have nothing to hide and nothing to prove. I had little to…

Don’t Repeal the 2nd Amendment — Enforce It How many gun owners could qualify to bear arms for a well-regulated militia? I like firearms — let’s get that straight. When my eyes were sharper and my back was straighter, I was a crack shot. Among other things in my safe, I have the Colt .45 my grandfather carried…

I don’t remember what time it was, if I ever knew, but I do remember sitting at the bar holding up a guy I’d never seen before who’d draped his arm over my shoulders to reminisce about our Army days together in places I’d never been while another stranger, a…

I was already in southern Turkey on my way to Syria when the Gulf War began in earnest in January 1991. I’d been unsuccessfully reporting on life in Eastern Europe behind the newly fallen Iron Curtain since the previous September. And there was this girl I liked in what was…

When this whole thing started, the family indulged in these long, elaborate breakfasts since there was no place anyone had to be, except maybe a Zoom meeting. Baked eggs, Dutch babies, sourdough waffles; things we once reserved only for Christmas or New Year’s. Now I’m down to half a banana…

In August 1984, I was in the summer term of my junior year at college in New York City, working part-time and starting chemotherapy for lymphoma. That went on for eleven months, including three months of radiation every day at 8 a.m., …

I came to Seattle in the spring of 1991 when I was 27 and somehow landed a part-time job tutoring teenagers. There was no good reason for me to be doing that, other than I’d had experience editing for a big-time publisher in New York City before succumbing to the…

Of the many questions we seek answers to across the infernal expanse of the internet, surely there was never one more purpose-built than: “How do I get rid of a ghost?” It was a problem I never expected to face nor one I was predisposed to artfully solve. Nevertheless, the…

When the United States entered World War I, my grandfather was recalled to duty from his family’s farm in southeast Kansas. …