This guy rings our doorbell and offers me $100 for one of the insulators that sit like glass bells on the top sills of our front windows. He wants the blue one, what I would call a Chagall blue, with “No. 19” embossed on its skirt along with the name of its maker—the Hemingray Company.

The steep price paid for one night on a beach with a boy

Last night in class, Jessica, an undergraduate in my creative-writing senior seminar, confessed that she was too depressed to write, and Laura, who had vowed the week before to snap out of her own depression and get back on track, was absent.

It’s 5 o’clock, and the long cases are over. There’s just one more to go—the last of the day. One of my partners throws open the operating-room door and stands facing me with his mask down around his neck, his surgeon s gown backward and hanging open over dirty scrubs, his pants pulled low by double pagers at his waist.“Want

In the spring of 2002, the crocuses pushed up and the daffodils blossomed and froze, and I worried about work—not my own, which I love, but what kind of work my developmentally disabled 18-year-old daughter, Rachel, might be able to do when she is no longer in the shelter of school.On

The message on the answering machine comes in a rush. I recognize my mother-in-laws voice but can decipher only the final three words: “Burning. Find Bob.”

On December 7, 1997, I stumbled out of my queen-sized bed, which occupied approximately half the floor space of my Brooklyn studio apartment, and crashed into my desk, which occupied a good portion of the other half.

A woman is sitting on the edge of a bed, loose photographs in her hands. She lays them out on the flowered quilt, studies them as a gambler would, or a tarot reader preparing to interpret the flow of a life.But

Several months ago I confessed. It was the end of an ordeal that—exacerbated by adolescent brooding and self-consciousness—lasted much longer than it should have.

Reader, I, too, wonder about what follows. I wonder what calls a person to think something is or is not funny. What causes us to remember some jokes and to forget others.