Phone. 4:45 a.m. Still dark out. Nobody calls with good news at this hour. Maybe somebody back east… Maybe something really great happened, so they know it’s okay to wake me up… Hope nobody died…

I was in my early teens when I met, for the first time, a book that didn’t like me.

“Should Ophelia trust Hamlet’s expressions of love?” Ms. Baker asked.
“No way!” Keena called out. Several others also shook their heads.
“Why not?” Ms. Baker pressed. “Mavis…? Are you with us? No? Tran? Don’t look at me. Look at the text.”

I met her for the first time at her father’s apartment just outside Washington, DC.

One Saturday a month, for twenty-five years, my mother and the upstairs neighbor, Frances, dyed each other’s hair. The two would chat and gossip over a growing mound of lipstick-tipped cigarettes and endless cups of coffee as they “partook of the fountain of youth,” their euphemism for this process.

Dear Brothers & Sisters of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Please don’t kill yourselves. Don’t do it. The suicide rate for Afghan/Iraq War vets is five times the numbers that die in the war, now about one an hour or 24 a day.

Seamus Heaney is a generous man by nature and by principle; perhaps sometimes too much so for his own good. He has written a humorous, yet wrenching poem about divided domestic and professional responsibilities, “An Afterwards.”

“Where are you from?”
“Lawrence, Massachusetts.”
“No, like, where’s your family from? Y’know, what are you?”

Writing of Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville and Twain, Quentin Anderson posed the following question in his book The Imperial Self: an Essay in American Literary and Cultural History: “Their struggles do indeed attest to the difficulty of growing up in this country—but what nation had ever gone so far toward dissolving social ties as this one?”

What I remember most about that hot and humid summer was the way fear took hold like a rip current.