By the time I was sixty-two, I’d been working for fifty years. Restaurants, hotels, my courier business, the Postal Service—different jobs, different responsibilities, but most of my life had been measured by somebody else’s clock.I…
People lose things all the time. Keys. Wallets. Phones. Usually, when we lose something, we start looking because somewhere in the back of our minds we expect to find it. But some things don’t work…
I woke up startled somewhere over Central America. Great Scott. I was strapped into my version of a DeLorean, hurtling toward Costa Rica and, apparently, my future. A week earlier, I had finished nine weeks…
January 19th was Martin Luther King Day, and I remember wondering whether the cancer treatment center would even be open. Apparently cancer doesn’t get the day off on holidays. By then, I’d already been through…
It was almost New Year’s Eve, and millions of people were getting ready to watch that giant ball in Times Square light up the night. I was waiting for something else to light up. A…
For almost fifty years, Christmas Eve had meant the same thing to me: before the night was over, I was going to Bedford Falls. I’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life so many times that George…
The other day I heard Tim McGraw singing Live Like You Were Dying, and I didn’t hear just another country song. I heard a number: 93.5. Three weeks after my Decipher test, I went back…
Every family has its own version of Groundhog Day. Ours lasted about ten days and were the most expensive days of the year. It started on November 25th with Shelby, rolled straight into Thanksgiving, picked…
I’d watched enough Stranger Things to know the Upside Down was supposed to be the darker, stranger version of the world everybody else was living in. That Thanksgiving, I didn’t need a portal to understand…
I’ve always loved Halloween because it gives adults permission to be a little silly. For weeks, nobody thinks twice about skeletons hanging from porches, fake cobwebs stretched across bushes, or grown people arguing about which…
