We arrived on a boat from England in 1956.  I was eight years old.  Almost from the minute we landed I started skating.  A frozen pond, an outside rink, an inside rink, a frozen river, I didn’t care.  If it had ice I was skating.  By the time I was twelve I was pretty good.  I was very fast in a straight line, I could cut either way, and stop on a dime. Then one day someone asked me which team I played for. That’s when I decided to take my prowess to the hockey rink.  I just assumed that if I could skate, hockey would be easy. I thought I would be a star ..read more

Following my mother’s death in May of 2017, one tenth of my life ago already, I was clearing out the apartment on East 72nd Street, where I had grown up, when I found a treasure I had forgotten about for a third of a century. It was an extra-thick, three-ring, loose-leaf binder, decorated in colorful characters from the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine. I had been given it by a childless family friend when I started elementary school during the final months of the ’60s. Since a first grader had no use for such an item, my mother put it away, thinking it might age into an interesting ar ..read more

Driving up the winding road, we were aware we were going higher and higher into the mountains, but it was too dark to fully take in our surroundings. It was late by the time we arrived at the hostel where we would spend the night. My wife, Kathy and I wanted to get away for a couple of days and someone had recommended this little place in the mountains of Taiwan.  Our three children stayed with friends as we set off for a relaxing stay in this village, removed from the bustling city of Taichung where we lived. We had by now lived for five years in this island nation near China and had be ..read more

Ten The TV’s tuned to the Food Channel, one of those timed cooking duels, during the very last moments of the dessert round. My mouth floods, imagining the creamy aroma of melted chocolate and the hot oven my mother once commanded. Mother never taught me to cook like she did my sister. When it was time to make dinner, I always got a pass from kitchen duty and went off to read a book. I may lack Pillsbury memories with my mother, but as I shift in my chair, eager to see the episode’s climax, I can’t stop remembering her. A dapper emcee with a boyish smile begins to countdown the competition’s ..read more

Lace one, chain two, cross over, slip, pull through. The silks danced and spun like two figures waltzing between my grandmother’s practiced fingers. I tried to copy her, but a thread caught the other around the knees instead of the waist, and they spun out of control. “Never mind,” Vida said, and the silky white threads continued to cascade from her hands, leaving a trail of delicate motifs: waterfall ripples, lacy petals, starfish in the ocean. Her fingers worked much faster than mine; they seemed like fluttering butterflies. “These are bellflowers from the slopes of Uka mountain. We call th ..read more

I never knew who I’d find on the other side of our apartment door when I answered a knock. I was living in Ibadan, Nigeria, in the late 1960s. One afternoon a very young man stood there; he was slight, with sloping shoulders, a wide smile, more teeth than chin, an eager expression. How old? Maybe seventeen, hard to tell. Over one shoulder he carried a big sack, bulging with knobby objects. Over the other, a broad strap supported a wooden drum rimmed with brass ornaments. The burdens seemed almost as big as he was. “Good afternoon, madam,” he said, looking up at me. “My name is Inioluwa. I am ..read more

The last time I saw Buzzy, there wasn’t much left of the Vienna I’d known as a young boy. And there wasn’t much left of Buzzy. The small, sleepy Southern town, 15 miles from Washington, was no longer small or sleepy or Southern. A highway ran through it. There was a 7-eleven at one end of town and a 7-eleven at the other, and in between were the usual chains—Safeway, Giant, Bob’s Big Boy, Rite Aid—set back behind vast parking lots filled with late-model SUVs. The old homes once lining the main thoroughfare—still called Maple Avenue, though the towering shade trees had been cut down—were gone ..read more

My morning journey starts in Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, close to the old Georgian house where I live in one of eight tiny bed-sitting rooms. It is my favorite part of London, but I travel east on the bus to Raines Foundation Grammar School in rather desolate dockland, where I teach science. I catch the 7:50, to get there by 8:30. I always go to the top deck and sit at the front. Usually, I am alone for the first part of the journey. The route is, after all, into the old City of London where work begins around 10 o’clock for all those men in three-piece suits who carry black umbrellas. I pre ..read more

It is the summer of 1962; the Cuban Missile Crisis is yet to happen. I’m six years old, pale and thin. A French doctor had prescribed a daily sip of red wine. I didn’t like the taste, but the sleeve of the wine bottle was perfect for making breastplates and helmets to convert my toy soldiers into medieval knights. At the time, we lived in a flat in an eighteenth-century building in Saint Germain-en-Laye. My pal, Maurice, galloped around the cobbled courtyard neighing like a horse and shouting “Ivanhoe”. I armed myself with wooden knives and short swords made from sticks and offcuts, tied toge ..read more

When my father died at the age of seventy-nine, the list of his worldly goods barely filled a single sheet from a yellow five-by-eight legal pad. This was not because he was impecunious; he had enough saved up to maintain a comfortable standard of living in New York City until he was at least the age his own father had been when he departed this world aged ninety-four. Neither was it because he was miserly. He had been helping to keep his girlfriend and her family for a dozen years, and had unflinchingly served as the principal provider for his third wife for about three times as long. During ..read more