Half Light
The first and only haircut I have given was to my mother, and because we were both nervous I took my time setting up a single-seat beauty parlor in her room at the hospital in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
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Failing at Important Things: A Parallel History
The sunset glowed in ribbons behind the Rockies to the west, backlighting the tractor as it chugged slowly along, and it was hard not to feel hopeful about the whole enterprise. We believed we could create something better for ourselves, for our children, by trying to become smaller, live simpler, love the land and each other more fiercely.
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Family Trees
My grandfather, a young boy in a red coat wandering the deep and snowy Lithuanian woods, found a litter of wolf cubs in a hollowed oak that had been rent by lightning. He placed the abandoned pups in the hood of his coat and carried them home, where he raised them, or he let them go, or he began a new narrative of our family inextricably linked ever after with white and quiet woods, with dogs, with hollowness sometimes filled by something unexpected. Soon after, he moved to Warsaw, where he stayed and where I, eventually, came from.
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SuperBabies Don’t Cry
When I was pregnant, I tried to make a SuperBaby. I did not realize I was doing this. I believed I’d long ago shed the theory that a body could be made perfect. But looking back, my goal was clear.
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Message from Your Inmate
think about you waking up. It gets light here early now, but I suspect it’s still dark when you rise. I don’t know if…
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The Worse That Threatens
made no move to turn on the oven or the space heater to warm our apartment. This was part of my morning custom, but…
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Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid
Recently, I was in New York City to do some publicity, and I was staying in a Holiday Inn in the Gowanus Canal of Brooklyn where the elevator shook and moaned every time we went to our tenth floor room as though the shaft were too small and the elevator was just barely squeezing through.
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The Voice
Whitney Elizabeth Houston died on February 11, four years ago. It was a Saturday, the night before the Grammy Awards, the weekend before Valentine’s Day. I was sitting on the red sofa in my first Brooklyn apartment procrastinating on a work assignment with a glass of white wine and hurt feelings about a romantic problem that often distracted me.
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Contrast Study
Contrast Study: An imaging procedure in which a contrast medium is introduced to enhance the image of a particular body region or structure.
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The Long Run
In August 2000, Charles Hubbard was passing through Reykjavík on his way home from a vacation in France with his wife and two daughters.
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The First Person on Mars
Somewhere near Kazakhstan, the 1980s: At nighttime, surrounded by goats, a little girl lay on her back in a pasture and pointed a small telescope toward the stars.
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Superdonor
Egg donation is nobody’s first choice. In a plush, glass-walled conference room in a Charleston hotel, a leading reproductive endocrinologist from South Carolina is illustrating as much.
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