One day a Stone Age tribe in Papua, New Guinea, greeted a charter pilot with bananas for his airplane and a desire to know what sex it was.

I’ve been asked time and again why I published “On Borrowed Words,” my memoir about language and identity in the Mexico of the ‘60s, at the age of 40. Isn’t that an unquestionably tender age?

Departing from Mexico City’s Benito Juárez airport becomes a stunning exercise in the optics of saturation. Unlike many more predictable urban departures, there is no quick cut away from a traffic-embroiled grid, no shocking glimpse of urban borders and geography, no single moment when the shape of a city becomes clear as a map: the slipper of Manhattan, the ragged sprawl of Houston, the tempting coasts of Miami.For

I must confess that I’m deaf in my left ear. And this causes emotional upheavals that, at their worst, can be confused with silliness and dementia.

Walking, I am sure my little, black pug, Picadou, would agree, is the essential part of our day. If Picadou could talk, I think she would say that grass is nice, but humans and canines—their smells, habits and whereabouts (or nowhereabouts)—are the most interesting.

When I was Mexico’s ambassador to the Netherlands in the ‘70s, the embassy received letters protesting the slaughter of sea turtles in my country.

Once there was a woman who loved water. On dry land, she could merely walk. But in the water, she could fly. She spent as much time as possible in the water, and that is where her husband first saw her—floating on her back in a swimming pool, completely at ease.

We shall not attempt a definition of the egg: Everyone knows quite well what it is and what its purposes, functions, signification, splendors and miseries are.

My father did seasonal work in the fields. He picked grapes in the summer, asparagus in the winter. In between, he held a series of odd jobs, mainly with construction crews whose company owner paid cold cash.

A hoarse and deliberate voice slowly woke me. At first I didn’t know what it was saying.