Where pay phones go to die. Great photos by David Bledsoe.
Tracks
Ellen Troutman is my role model.
Measuring grief in meetings and pizza breaks
This story just breaks your heart.
Chuck warns him to be careful of “regular stuff.” That, he says, is what can really knock you down. “Stuff around the house can get you,” Chuck says. “A toaster or a coffee maker that they used to use, and now it’s just there. Kind of a reminder that he is not using it.”
Again, the room grows quiet. Some of these boys have been in these sessions for half their high school years. They know when it is best to be still.
They no longer have to try not to remember that day or the terrible days that followed, they said. “Any pain or suffering I felt has been replaced with joy,” Williams said. “Discovering that I was going to be a father is how I’ll always remember the Marathon.”
If there is one constant in the world of baseball, from its invention in the 19th century to the present, it must be its inextricable link with beer. The connection is almost Pavlovian: When I watch a baseball game, my mouth tells me it wants a beer. (For someone who watches baseball professionally, this can raise quite the occupational hazard.) I’m not sure what about the game inspires such a yearning. Maybe it’s the spring air, the smell of cut grass, all that Ken Burns business. Maybe it’s the dirt and dust. Maybe it’s the fact that half the stadiums are named after brands of beer. Now that I think about it, it’s probably that.
There is a lovely backspin in silence.
I had brought an old copy of “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s masterpiece that takes place in the back streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. I wanted to read it cover to cover. I have been dipping into the novel for many years, reading the accessible parts, plundering the icing on the cake, but in truth I had never read it all in one flow.
The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.
Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.
He walked the city alongside Bloom, then turned the corner into Eccles Street, and then another corner into my hospital room and sat on the edge of my bed. I could smell the whiskey and cigarettes on his breath.
The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Happy Bloomsday, Happy Father’s Day
I was one of those people who hysterically supposed that web-based hordes of armchair opinion-emitters would kill the market for longform reportage. But it appears not to be so. I think our appetite for literary nonfiction is pretty inelastic, from Pliny the Younger through De Quincey, Mayhew, Orwell, Didion to the heavies of the present moment. I think people are compelled in some essential way to read accounts of true things rendered with novelists’ tools.
It sometimes felt to Mark in these moments like his grief was still deepening, like the worst was yet to come. After the gunfire, the funerals, the NRA protests and the congressional debates, they were finally coming into the lonely quiet.
Donald Hall has my permission to write all, or at least most, of the things.
In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. … Despite the itch, I persisted until I looked something like a Brady photograph, or at least not like a professor of English literature at the University of Michigan.
The criminal justice system had exonerated Michael and, at long last, brought Christine’s killer to justice. Later this year, Travis County prosecutors are expected to try Norwood for Debra Baker’s murder. And Ken Anderson, the former Williamson County DA, is facing the possibility of jail time. After a court of inquiry investigated allegations of prosecutorial misconduct this past February, a judge ruled that Anderson, now a sitting judge, will face criminal contempt and tampering charges for failing to turn over exculpatory evidence. Yet there was one thing the justice system had not been able to rectify: it could not put a family back together.
The conclusion to Pam Coloff’s reporting on the murder investigation of Christine Morton. If you haven’t read it yet, read this and this first.
