The first was a gerbil named Herbie. I was about ten years old. He came with another male gerbil, who turned out not to be male; many more gerbils followed. They had names, too, but Herbie is the only one that survives in memory. Some of their great-grandchildren escaped into a hospital office building; I like to think they established a permanent colony. Mice aren’t gerbils, I know, but really. Close enough. Herbie I considered a friend. I cried when he died, and dug him a grave with a headstone. Continue reading

The phone rang yesterday afternoon. I picked it up. Continue reading

Iqaluit is a place where people seem to wash ashore, like Indian wedding decorations or terra cotta pot shards in Jamaica Bay. How did they get there? Where are they going? Who knows? Apart from Inuit and government administrators, it’s a rare person who can explain just how he came, by long-thought plan, to live in a city of 6,184 souls, some 1,200 icy uninhabited miles north of Ottawa, a day’s snowmobile ride from the Arctic Circle. Continue reading

I stumbled across this photograph several days ago, and am endlessly cheered by it: the shipwreck’s skeleton a classic symbol of human aspirations broken and forgotten and on the shoals of fate, as embodied by nature; but the penguins give fate’s indifference a comic, even absurd, aspect. Continue reading

Something I’ve been wondering: Why does style matter? One possibility: because the context in which style is expressed — a task, an ordeal — is often unavoidable, or unimportant, or impossible, and requires nothing more than utilitarian resignation; style is personal triumph against the impersonality of fate, a joy in process rather than product, a form of control over destiny, like a leaf charting its own course in the wind.

On Saturday, as I descended the stairwell leading from the locker rooms to the pool at my YMCA, I was brought up short by a child who made a tent with his fingers and stopped to waggle them, oblivious to the person walking just behind him. Continue reading

A spacious, stone-floored room lined in cheap oak and pine veneer, old and poorly lacquered, shining stickily in milky light from a row of unwashed windows, high on the wall with blinds askew. In the back half of the room, wooden benches with straight backs; in front of them, a yard-sale hodgepodge of office tables. Three women in department-issue security guard jackets cluster around a computer monitor, chatting over coffee. Continue reading