Shortly before my maternal grandfather died of prostate cancer, he gave my Uncle Bill, his eldest son and namesake, a box full of things whose inheritance he wanted to ensure while he still could. Its contents included, among other things, an official MLB baseball of uncertain context, a program from JFK’s 1961 inauguration, and most tantalizingly, a manila envelope that read, in Pop-Pop’s Sharpie scrawl, “Letters to Anita: Do Not Open Until After I’m Dead.”…
My ninety-year-old grandmother is a time traveler now. She wakes up one day and thinks she’s needed at her aunt’s old house in Jamestown, New York, because the top floor of the farmhouse has to be fixed up to rent. Another day, she might speak of wrangling children in my grandparents’ first house in Cleveland; making Swedish apple pie in Everett, Washington with her Aunt Jenny; or sitting at her dying sister’s bedside in Redding,…
Ah, my foes, and oh my friends: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, and I'm back. I've seen silent stars at 10,000 feet and a stone sunset carved out of old and massive earth and I've been inside a cave that had a secret bar and dance floor in the back and I've had eggs and black coffee every morning before "we'd better get on the road if we want to make it to Bryce…
