You have lost something. You look for it. You find a key in your pocketbook. A picture. Two books of matches from Baltimore alley restaurants. Your mind has slipped in ways that you cannot explain.

My sister married Leo Brady because he was a merchant seaman and made good wages, and because he was gone most of the time. She and her five-year-old boy had been living on the sales of her cable-car etchings that tourists to San Francisco picked over in the little art galleries and 

The room on Vernal street in Los Angeles was the last room my father rented for us. In that old green three storied house with pigeons and gables and fire-escape, he went over the line and his decline wasn’t anymore a matter between father and son.

He didn’t drink because he was an alcoholic, and he didn’t write poetry because he wasn’t good at it.

I don’t miss childhood, but I do feel a pang now and then for its sensory overload, the feeling of it, when the woods were more immediate, and the air, and the trees, and more real somehow.

I was always happy again when I encountered Anton. He frequented the same café as I, and he, like me, had other things to do between visits—the large garden, the family, he was a man of private means—and as a rule he chose to sit alone at a table and most often only for a short time.

Like all prolonged natural disasters, the Dakota dust bowl bred superstition. Real estate changed hands by the bushel.The government and railroad boosters had told dirt-poor eastern farmers that

The two men motioned again for me to sit. I walked toward the traffic and they called out to me, throwing in my direction either a salutation or an insult. If I had turned around, I could have heard them clearly, but I stayed facing in the direction I was going. As I approached the blur of cars, cows, and goats, I considered the extent of my suffering. 

The night before their appointment, they sent Haley one final e-mail in which they reaffirmed the when and where and tastefully restated their excitement. But Reuben managed to smuggle in a request: Would Haley mind wearing “normal clothes”? He was about to hit send when Brenna, proofreading over his shoulder, announced