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Normal Brain
I am driving again. Madera to San Jose, San Jose to Madera. Central Valley to the Bay and back, the same road, the same hours, until I stop seeing it.At one end is my own treatment. At the other is my mother, who is stage four now — the cancer in her bones. I am…
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Shithole people
I took a break from hospice volunteer work for a while. But I always come back to thoughts about my very first assignment, a man I ended up calling Elvis, though that was nowhere near his real name. He was born in China, moved to Brazil as a young man, and came to America once…
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Cotton fields
The drive was an hour each way, three or four times a week, for the better part of a year. Central Valley flat, the same stretch of cotton fields going by every single time, white and low and endless in a way that stopped registering as scenery after the first few weeks and just became…
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German Pancakes
The batter is nothing. Three eggs, half a cup of flour, half a cup of milk, half a cube of butter melted in the pan until it’s just short of burning. You pour it in and it puffs up in the oven like it’s showing off, golden and ridiculous, crater in the middle where the…
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Letting them fly
This is the first in a series of essays I’m writing to make sense of the last thirty years —the illness, the divorce, the fight to keep my kids, and who we all became on the other side of it. I didn’t picture it this way.Somewhere in my head, before any of this started, there…
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Whatever Held 