Boyhood
That magic zone of love without possession, of work as game and game as life itself, the heart unprotected, the imagination unbound, was an incipiency, a hint or sketch of what another kind of human life might be.
photographs
Widdershins
The gantry above the vehicle ramp advertises the short route to New Jersey. A dubious claim—leaving aside the question of why one would want to go to New Jersey—but it stirs a memory of an epic bike ride.
Weedpatch
For a moment, suppose migrancy decriminalised and all the border apparatus, the walls, the arrests, the holding pens, the clogged courts, the caged children, the separation of families, all dismantled.
Ambush
You don’t see praying mantises much any more. They’ve disappeared, along with grasshoppers and crickets. I remember them from my childhood in Brooklyn. On hot summer days occupying a place on the sidewalk, indifferent to everything, waiting and still, a little frightening in their composure.
Squareheads
The impeccable balance between elegant design and fitness for use. Responsiveness and refinement. He calls her “dainty.” “That flower of a barque,” he says. The ship itself a living thing, the main character in a thumping good tale of seas and men and seamanship.
Mildred
It was a common name for girls among Norwegian immigrants. Rutgersen, Börresen, Dahl, Aarstad. And others. All produced Mildreds. The vogue lasted across at least two generations. No one names girls that any more, not since the War.