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The summer after my freshman year in college, I worked at the local mall in a shop called The Laminators. It was basically a framing shop, but instead of putting people's diplomas and photos into...

I was not quite six years old.  I didn't have much of a vocabulary, and found TV shows other than cartoons utterly boring.  But my tiny, everyday world was filled with mind-stretching mysteries....

Near the end of my second year in graduate school, I spent a sunny afternoon in Boston at the city’s Earth Day celebration.  I bought something to eat from a street vendor: maybe a gyro sandwich...

As I sat in the fluorescent light of the waiting room last Friday, I thought about how I was going to miss my teeth.  It wasn’t that I was facing a lifetime of difficulty chewing.  Wisdom teeth...

The four tiny Chihuahua puppies were whirlwinds of frantic energy moving across the carpeted sunroom floor.  The two smallest and darkest, male and female littermates, wandered among the watching...

In the final moments of the dream, I watched my 9th grade Spanish teacher throw a portable radio high into the air.  As it landed with a crash, I awoke to the sound of my UCLA roommate, Bobby,...

The little town in southern North Carolina featured a small collection of chain hotels, the usual fast food joints and an industrial plant that had contaminated the groundwater with its waste.  I...

A few weeks ago I had a minor health scare: an anomaly during a routine checkup that could have been serious but turned out, after 11 days of waiting to see a specialist, to be nothing...

In the fall of my junior year in college, I got stuck with a final exam in the very last possible time block, from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. on a Friday.  The test--on industrial organization theory--was...

I met my future wife on the fifth of December some years ago.  I was sitting with a friend and colleague in the lobby of The Priory, a Pittsburgh hotel.  We had flown in from San Diego for a staff...