Not long after my mother died, I was wandering down Burlingame Avenue when a friend approached and we fell into conversation. His mother was d…

In college, I used to call home once a week, on Sunday nights. My parents wanted a report, and, I’m sure, I never gave them as full of an acco…

Since my mother’s stroke, I’ve spent a part of each day sitting by her bedside in San Mateo, watching her mostly sleep. My wife and I recently…

The other night I was sitting at our dining room table, sipping a shelter-in-place martini while my wife sautéed pork loins a few steps away i…

I once had a student in a fiction writing class who was living in her car. I found out about this by chance when she told me that the reason s…

“Listen to this,” my wife JoAnneh said. She was leafing through an old journal of hers. It was a Sunday and we were sitting on a bench in fron…

The other day I was standing in front of a wall of books at the Burlingame Library. Walls are too much with us these days, separating us not o…