After the third incoming call from my wife, one after the other, I think to myself, “Maybe I should pick this up.”

It turns out our daughter has split her chin open and is bleeding everywhere. My wife says she’ll be to me in about two minutes and could I please come outside and go to the doctor to figure out what to do?

I am finishing up my visit with them in the rehab center. And this whole time, I felt the anointing oil flask in my pocket burning in my consciousness, somewhat like the ring I had hidden in my pocket all those years ago when I proposed to my wife.

It was calling to me to take it out and use it.

Why do I tremble?

“Oh!” the Walmart employee gasps. “What do you have there?”

“It’s my iPhone.”

“How old is it?”

We have two sour cream containers in the fridge, and I have this thing about consolidation. Sometimes, I’ll take out more of the ingredient than is proportionally appropriate for the meal just to have the pleasure of finishing it off.

We are in the car when my son asks me if I can build a house. I say no. “I’m not a builder man. I don’t know how to do that.”

He silently thinks for awhile, turning things over in his mind…

Today is Inauguration Day — the day a new President of the United States is installed. And I am insatiably curious about it all: the history of inaugurations, the drama behind the peaceful transfer of power, who’s going to be there (and not be there). Questions like, How do they move the old family in and the new family out in under a day?

It has been overcast for the better part of the previous weeks, so on Christmas morning, as I open the curtains, I am expecting to see the same. But light pours in from a grand sunrise, the color of mellow orange juice poured over the sky as if it is a vapor being released from a pitcher, expanding out and out.”

Day of purchase:

I’m at Goodwill and I cannot believe my luck.

$6.99 for a pair of black dress shoes! They’re my size, my style, and in seemingly great condition. Unfamiliar with the brand, I look it up on my phone, and discover that…

I don’t quite understand yet why it made me smile so much. But there we all were, in a little single file train, walking to the library, me and my kids. We had a whack of children’s books to return, and the first thing I thought of was…

Warning: biohazard

The symbol on the bag does a good job at making you believe that what you are about to open up “poses a serious risk to human health” (the definition of a biohazard).

But the thing I’ve never understood, this being my fourth time bringing home my wife’s placenta after the birth, is how this organ, which is the original life-giving source of every human being who has ever been born, is treated as …

It is morning, and I’m in bed. I get a call on my phone. It’s my wife, who’s sleeping downstairs in this early postpartum season. “Just thought you might want to wake up so that you get a little time to yourself.”

“It’s too late,” I reply. “They’re already here.”

Heave, heave, heave goes his belly as he breathes, moving like the tall stark trees outside our panoramic hospital window. In the middle of winter, they are still, yet if you look closely, they are moving slightly at the tip top.

My second son was born yesterday. And I have awoken from a dream.

I am reading Jacob’s Gift to my kids for their bedtime story. It is a story set in biblical times about a boy named Jacob who is quite good at woodworking and gets lost in the craft. A Rabbi tells Jacob, “God has given you the gift of woodworking. What is difficult for many is easy for you. Surely, you’ve noticed.”

My daughter grabs two handfuls of almonds from the pantry and comes to give them to me on the couch. As she crawls up to me and plops herself on my lap, I let myself feel the pleasant weight of her almost-2-year-old body.

“The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined…by the pressure of circumstances…and where there is never any room for choice.” [1]

Simone Weil

There is a bad kind of pressure that forces you into something you don’t want. And there is a good kind, which moves you toward a beautiful life.