When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don't think it's performing a character, really, if the character you're performing is yourself. I don't see that as playing a role. It's just appearing in public.

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.