I – Freefall Pumping my legs higher, higher, my feet scrape the painfully blue October sky. As the day gathers itself down, my shoes slice through the gnarled crowns of pines now brushed with gold. The swing’s momentum carries my…

On a train ride back home from a rehearsal last month, I discovered that the jazz drummer Roy Haynes passed away at age 99. Roy was one of the greatest drummers in history, a pioneer in modern jazz who played…

“Do you have any idea how much weed I smoke with your mom?”
The room breaks into laughter. Will basks in his punchline, soaking up the spotlight. He saunters across the stage smiling, his eyes down, as if his next…

Our house on Pocahontas Path was small and inviting, with a 70s-style flat roof, a tree swing in the front yard, and a minor cockroach problem. Inside, ribbons, dance shoes, crayons, and sugar- free Cheerios littered every corner. At the…

Looks like it was taken from a very old camera. The film’s grain appears much sharper than grains of sand. The blue in the sky is paler than it should be, blurring the lines between sea and sky. Cameras back…

What shall you do now that your computer and technological devices are broken? You have no camera either, no little thing to prop you up, to focus you. Are you willing to hike, when everyone else has gone home, or…

“Why do you want to go so far away to college,” Mom wanted to know? “We have a perfectly good university right here in Buffalo. Your cousins went to UB,” she continued, “look at Jimmy, he’s now a professor of history in Colorado.” Mom waved her hand as if shooing away a fly. “Massachusetts Institute of Technology—what’s the attraction? No one I mentioned it to has ever heard of that place.” ...

“The Old Ones who gave us these songs and dances said that when we do this, they will come and hear our prayers for help and healing,” Buck Ghost Horse told me years ago, inviting me as he did every…

As sunlight peeks through the humid, foggy morning, I look out the car window to see clumps of fallen trees lying in odd, abandoned piles, across the road. Crippled branches, bent and contorted, reach towards the car like brittle fingers.…