Grocery List
The other day I was in the supermarket and spotted somebody’s grocery list lying on the dirty floor. It was in the gluten-free aisle. The paper was grimy with the tread marks of a...
Category: Waypoints
Irish Studies
Learning a new language requires one to enter an unfamiliar, sometimes unsettling world. In 1985, I spent the summer in a small Irish village faraway on the western end of Galway Bay. My idea...
Visible Storage: A Ghost Story
One time I took a hike through the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. It’s a big place. At the trailhead is a ranger station where they charge admission. I got past that and...
When Circumstances Are Right
My study is dusty and cluttered, a room jammed with all the items that go with being O’Grady: books lining the walls and stacked on the floor, file drawers crammed with manuscripts, storage boxes...
Sticking Together
Late one November afternoon, we stood before the gates of Woodlawn Cemetery on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. We entered and came upon a quaint gatekeeper’s cottage with a uniformed guard inside. He took...
Mud Meadow
The name of our place is Mud Meadow. I’m not sure how that came about, but it’s what my father always called it. I don’t know if he made it up himself or heard...
A Dead Cat
Stories are like weeds—they come up everywhere and unexpectedly. Sometimes when I’m reading, I’ll nod off and find myself in the middle of a story that hasn’t been written yet. In that shadowy territory...
Further Adventures in Commerce
The wine store. I’m waiting at the checkout counter. Three aisles away, a big fellow, sixty-something, dressed in black t-shirt and ill-fitting sweatpants, stands shouting through a star-spangled mask into his phone. His wife...
A Memory Resurrected
They say that memory is a kind of treasure house, but I’ve always thought of it more as a graveyard without monuments. It’s easy to lose track of what’s buried there. Recently I was...
The Whole World Is Medicine
Used to be that I spent a lot of time in the cafeteria of a certain Catholic hospital. It doesn’t matter which one. The circumstances of my life were more demanding in those days....