Upon my return from Boston, where I attend college, and dizzy with the prospects of home, the customary pile of mail one expects after a long sojourn greeted me. Two thin off-white envelopes lay within …

I was enthusiastic about it from the start. World War II had ended only three years before, and I had spent my early childhood poring over battle maps in the evening paper, reading comic books …

When the fall quarter began in 1972, I vowed to make no new friends at school. I was a third-year graduate student in literature at U.C. Irvine. I was finishing coursework and would take qualifying …

It was the first week of September, must have been. I was 13 and it was 1964. JFK was dead less than a year, but the Beatles were making us feel better about it. I …

The second day of seventh grade, the students of my new junior high were having a sit-in in the library over open campus. There were about 40 of them on the floor between the stacks, …

It looks as if you're cradling a baby goat in your arms while something explodes from its backside. Right wrist rests atop left elbow. Right elbow rests atop left wrist. Right pinky and index finger …

The first day of higher education started for me with morning ablutions in my own private bathroom. I had one of the few single rooms on the dorm's fourth floor, and baths adjoined no other …

Day one, 5 a.m. I am buttoned into an immaculate uniform, my polished black shoes sport steel toes, I carry a whip, rubber spreader, and an 11-inch slicer. My heart bangs at over 100 beats …

My parents had taught me that, as a Catholic, I was a member of the One True Church. But the Catholic school I attended in first, second, and third grades stopped teaching that kind of …

The winter I was in fifth grade, my father brought home a National Geographic book that seemed to consist entirely of swamp photographs. He turned the thick, glossy pages for me, and I stared at …

What a brown land, I thought, peering out of a late-'80s station wagon, at the chaparral-covered mountains looming over the Santa Clarita Valley. I was headed to a Great Books college, Thomas Aquinas, tucked away …

First day of kindergarten, newly arrived in Boston, newly separated from my best friend (and neighbor) Andy, doing the standard weeping thing, even though I had attended preschool back in upstate New York and loved …

Graduate school started not with a bang or with a whimper, but with the slow fall of a scarf down my head and over my eyes. Three things terrified me about my arrival at Brown …

It was September 1950, and that first day of school my brown uniform shirt scratched, the heavy corduroy pants were stiff with newness, my suspenders would not stay up, and my new shoes (bought a …

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people. — Andre Dubus I had it all planned out. During the last week …