Sublime

On the drives to and from Macy’s, the Rinconada pool, the zoo, or her house, on El Camino or on Alameda de las Pulgas or Highway 280, she would talk about finding the Skyway, a road that she said ran way up above us, above the ground, in the clouds. “If only we could find it,” she said. “There’s an on-ramp somewhere around here.” We both looked for

‘I’m only saying. It’s human nature to think we’re all here for some big purpose. But most of us aren’t. Most of us are ordinary, and it’s important to accept it. A person has to be content to lead a normal life. There’s no shame in it.’ The three of us sit in terrible, awkward silence. The worst thing that could happen would be for me to fail, to

We can’t really give to our children what we don’t have ourselves. In that sense, my greatest gift to my daughter is that I continue to work on myself. Children learn more through imitation than through any other form of instruction. Our greatest opportunity to positively affect another person’s life is to accept God’s love into our own.

I want to be better than that. In her story “Floating Bridge,” Alice Munro writes about times “when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.”

Writers are like vacuum cleaners, sucking up all that we can see and hear and read and think and feel and articulate, and everything that everyone else within earshot can hear and see and think and feel. We’re mimics, we’re parrots—we’re writers.