The boys with their van. Photograph courtesy of the author.

My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming.

I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing.

Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it.

Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride.

There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen. Read More

Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón, Bilbao. Photograph by Zarateman, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

I was fifteen in the year 2000. Turn of the millennium, turn of tables and tides. Every morning there were reports on the radio, and every night the news showed footage of the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC forces. Folding tables and plastic chairs in a room with no walls, and I don’t think anyone really thought anything would come of it.

Still, we watched. The future of our country on the screen and on a precipice. History about to reassert itself or buckle under the demands of men in linen shirts and bootlegged fatigues. At 9 P.M. every night between 1999 and 2002, the cameras settled on sweat-stained shirts and stern faces to capture the exact moment when we would all be remade with the stroke of a pen and a handshake like fishermen in a Bible verse. Microphones, dress shoes, and rifles. What’ll happen next? we asked. Stay tuned, they said.

On Sunday night, May 14, it was the same. What will happen next? We’ll have to see. I washed my shoelaces in the bathroom sink for Monday school-uniform inspection before morning Mass, while three hours north of Bogotá, a man carefully packed explosives into a PVC pipe frame, like a hermit crab slides a soft body into a borrowed shell.

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Photograph by Dzan Fotos, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

October 2022. We were making up after a long argument when I gave my girlfriend a tight hug and we heard a noise like a car backfiring.

“What was that?” she said.

“I think I broke your ribs,” I said. I’ve had a broken rib, I broke my friend Bob’s ribs, doesn’t make me an expert.

The X-ray showed a density in her lung. Next she had a CAT scan with contrast. (Never say “dye.”) After that came the pulmonologist, then radiology. Bronchoscopy. They sent her home on my birthday, still coughing up what they called a normal amount of blood. Needle biopsy and pneumothorax, a fancy way to say her lung collapsed. They kept her in the hospital on suction for two days. Then it was time for oncology. And chemotherapy and immunotherapy and thoracic surgery were still in her future, waiting.

Medical stories should not be suspenseful. She lived. Read More

Drawing by Turner Brooks.

I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis.

The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins. Read More