“It is the peak of baby.” Newborns don’t speak. One year olds are closer to little children than little bundles. The exact midpoint, the six-month period, is the best time of babyhood. “Wait until she turns six months old,” I’ve told people. “The beginning is fun, but that’s the age when it all comes together.” I knew it, I believed it, I saw the pictures of our first child around the key point in her infancy, yet it is always amazing…
I am not an artist. I am not a poet. As much as I enjoy writing and I consider myself a good writer, even using that term is a stretch. I wanted to write nothing. I wanted everything I had poured onto the keyboard for the last 24 hours to stand alone, unaltered by anything I could add to it later. At various points in the evening, I had to force myself to stop thinking about what I could share and…
I held the fate of two men in my hands. One of them had to die, while the other would be spared. It would ultimately be my decision which one woke up the next morning. I tormented myself over this choice not because I didn’t know who I wanted dead, but because I wanted neither alive. Both people had wronged me. Both were dangerous. And both were about to do terrible things. Neither deserved to live, yet one had to. In…