A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

...prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.