Exploring the World

By Miranda Jones

When I decided to spend my junior year of college in Jerusalem, I had visions of finding the Jewish me that had eluded my Montana-based childhood. Of course, things never work out the way you think and I realized that – in spite of the late-onset bat mitzvah I was talked into by many well-meaning religious friends – I was not going to become a super Jew. Instead of attending temple, I found myself falling into a different ritual altogether, a rhythm inspired by the city during Shabbat.

On Friday afternoons, I would join the crowds at the shuk (open-air market) to pick out the best looking half-plucked chickens, then queue up to buy bouquets of flowers, finding my place in line behind a flank of black-hatted men. Back at my campus’ communal kitchen, a couple friends and I would make dinner together, light the candles, fumble through some prayers. And then we’d just sit together. Those evenings became my home away from home, a touchstone that grounded me. Although I was never able to exactly replicate it back in the States, Shabbat was my favorite souvenir from Jerusalem, and if enjoying cooking and sharing a meal with good friends is the barrier to entry, then I pass the Jew test with flying colors.

How can you take home with you wherever you go?

What is the most valuable new ritual you've brought home from a trip?

Miranda Jones is a writer, editor, and one-half of the brother/sister furniture-designing duo Galanter & Jones.

Inside/Outside

By Aaron Davidman

The subway the freeway the airwaves stop. The traffic the deadlines the newspaper stop. The shopping the carpool the homework stop. The iPhone the iPad the Internet stop. The politics restaurant food stamps homeless man garbage can God plan stop. The drones and the clones and the suicide belts. The attacks and the cracks in the facts and the holy arcade by the black street parade and another kid down she’s been kicked by the trade. Ones and zeros piled high as the sky and the nighttime cries while the dreamer’s awake he can’t shake the mistakes of the dizzying day.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

Catch a breath. Take a sip of cool air. Sit on the ground on a rock on a bed on a chair.

Light a candle. Take a walk. Under trees. Holding hands. Bare feet.

Breathe deep.

Close the eyes. Go inside. As the belly expands then the weight of demands have a chance to release.

Breathe deep.

Give it time to unwind. The cells need fresh air to repair.

The mind quiets. The candle burns. The time slows down. The breath is here. Always. To remind. The closest friend in the world, the breath. As the world speeds on. I breathe into rest.    

How do you renew?

What have you learned about yourself by unplugging? 

Aaron Davidman is a playwright and performer in San Francisco.

Inside/Outside

By Nachman of Breslov

Grant me the ability to be alone;

May it be my custom to go outdoors each day

Among the trees and grass - among all growing things

And there may I be alone, and enter into prayer,

To talk with the One to whom I belong.

May I express there everything in my heart,

And may all the foliage of the field -

All grasses, trees, and plants -

Awake at my coming,

To send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer

So that my prayer and speech are made whole

through the life and spirit of all growing things,

Which are made as one by their transcendent Source.

May I then pour out the words of my heart

Before your Presence like water, 

And lift up my hands to You in worship,

On my behalf, and that of my children!

What has been the most profound spiritual experience of your life?

What is your relationship with nature?

Nachman of Breslov, the founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement, lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Ukraine.

Gender

By Gregor Ehrlich

A few years ago, my mother developed an interest in photo pairings — images that looked like other images. She developed an eye for odd similarities. Sometimes she would photograph a farm boy because his nose looked like former president Bill Clinton’s, or a checkout girl who looked like Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring.

Once she had me float on my back in bay water, to resemble a photo of her father, the rabbi, taken in the Dnieper River, in Poland, right before the Nazi invasion in 1939. When she found a photo of my great-aunt Ida in the old country, feeding chickens in the yard of a farm, she was very excited. Aunt Ida was of the era when cameras were still new and suspicious, and family lore has it that Ida always refused to have her picture taken. My mother decided to restage this rare photo, with herself in the starring role. She spent about three months getting the outfit together — sewing a dress and getting the right shoes. Rather than procuring live chickens (our days of owning livestock had ended with a move to the suburbs), she used a papier mâché ornamental chicken that my father had bought at a garage sale, probably someone’s souvenir from a holiday in Mexico. She got the right kind of basket, and then even put seeds in it.

I took the photo, and then reworked it in Photoshop to better resemble the older photo. When I handed her the print, she found it hilarious that I had labeled it “My Mother Is Crazy.” [From “A Life in Chickens,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 3, Summer 2006]

What do men learn from their mothers? What do daughters learn from their fathers?

Is personality transferable across gender lines?

Gregor Ehrlich is a writer, artist, animator, and producer.

Gender

By Lauren Wilkinson

As a woman, when I walk down the street, I try to pick up clues from the people coming toward me. Are they friendly? Are they threats? Should I move to the side or avert my eyes? What guides me, largely, is intuition.

What is intuition? It’s an expression of intellect. What is intellect? It’s many things. Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, has outlined two different cognitive systems inside our brains. System 1 is a largely unconscious mode of reasoning. It involves fast thinking. System 2 cognition is analytical and slow.

Intuition is a part of System 1 thinking. It’s is our ability to instantaneously and subconsciously pick up on social clues: the note in a friend’s voice that suggests they are angry with you, or the almost indiscernible expression that suggest they are lying. 

Intuition, long the stuff of myth, is recently the stuff of study. Last year, a study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology (a real journal) suggested that women are “more intuitive” because of lower prenatal testosterone exposure. The study was interesting, but not compelling. I would be more interested—and more convinced—by a study that investigated the link between a woman’s reliance on her intuition and her relative sense of personal safety. Perhaps is more likely that there are social factors at play, and not biological ones. Perhaps it is simply that people are trained to respond differently to potential dangers. As a woman living alone in a big city, I walk down the street alone in a big city. My awareness of my own lack of power is a source of power.

Do men and women have different kinds of power?

Are the powers of different genders in conflict or are they complements?

Lauren Wilkinson grew up in New York and lives in the Lower East Side. Her debut novel, L’American, is forthcoming from Random House.

Mindfulness & Shelter

By Emily Gould

The first time I walked into Deborah Wolk’s Iyengar yoga class, I was a complete mess. I’d just started a new job, and I was working all the time, even when there was nothing left to work on. Which might explain why my friend Lori kept trying to drag me to her yoga class. And which might also explain why I’d been putting up a fight. I didn’t want to slow down and check in with myself, to have to think about why I was feeling so terrible at every waking moment. And I didn’t want anyone else to pay attention to me, either, lest they notice any of the enormous number of ways in which I was fake and lame and inadequate. I just wanted to disappear.

Deborah singled me out right away. “Emily has scoliosis,” she announced barely five minutes into the class. “Everyone, come over here and look at Emily’s curve.”

The class crowded around me and ogled my back as I stayed put in a forward bend. Deborah, who from this angle seemed to be entirely composed of sinewy muscles and wild, dark curls, put her hand on my lower back and told me to breathe into her hand. She spoke in a soothing tone that made everything sound woo-woo and ridiculous, but I gave in and let the seldom-used muscles there respond to the heat of her palm. For a moment, I felt a kind of relaxation no pill had ever provided. [From “Deconstructing Deborah,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 5, Summer 2007]

When was the last time you tended to your body?

Is technology taking your away from inner peace?

Emily Gould is an author and journalist whose books include the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever and the novel Friendship.

Mindfulness

By B.J. Miller

We all need a reason to wake up. For me, it was 11,000 volts of electricity. One night, sophomore year of college, a few friends and I were out on the town; one thing led to another, and we decided to climb a parked commuter train. Fun, no? I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, whammo!  The current arced to my metal wristwatch, entered my arm, and blew down and out my feet. I lost half of an arm and both legs below the knee. I spent a few months recovering in the St Barnabas burn unit in Livingston, NJ. One day, several weeks in to the affair, it began to snow outside. I was told it was coming down hard and pretty. Around that time, a friend of mine smuggled a snowball into the burn unit for me. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt. The sensation of coldness on my skin, the miracle of it as I watched it melt to water. In that moment, I was amazed enough to be any part of this planet in this universe that whether I lived or died became irrelevant.

How important are human lives in the larger scope of things?

When are we sheltered, and when are we exposed?

BJ Miller, M.D., is a palliative care specialist and educator at UCSF, and executive director of San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project.

Childhood

By Mickey Rapkin

It was 1990 and like most kids in their Bar Mitzvah year, I was more interested in planning My Super Sweet 13 than practicing my Haftorah. I imagined sequined dancers and a ten-piece band. I obsessed over the mix of food stations. My parents supplied giant foam fingers like you’d get at a Knicks game. When I look back at the photos I wonder: Why did I ever want such an elaborate celebration of puberty? I guess because I was 13 and overweight and imperfect and I wanted to feel the love. If I could do it all over again, I can’t say I’d skip the party. But I wish I’d have joined my dad during the hora, as he raised one hand in the air and did Arsenio Hall’s signature whoop whoop whoop. I wish I’d have practiced the silly poems he wrote for the candle lighting ceremony instead of reading them cold, wondering what the word mishpucha meant. I would have talked to my mishpucha (it means family!) instead of hanging out in the bathroom. Years later I learned what all real men know: That this pain? This too shall pass. I would have told myself, “You won’t always feel so small.”

What advice would you give your younger self?

Would your younger self listen?

Mickey Rapkin is a journalist and author whose books include “Pitch Perfect” and “Theatre Geek.”

Childhood

By Josh Kun

I have never been one to stand up straight, even before I was tall. As a kid, I was always criticized for my posture. My mother would pull on a hair from the top of my head, as if it were a string directly connected to my spine. In home movies of birthday parties and holidays, the camera always catches me slightly hunched (usually in corduroy Ocean Pacific shorts and white Big 5 tube socks pulled up to the knee), indulging in one of my two favorite bad habits: biting my nails and twirling my bowl-cut dirty-blond hair into tangled, often painful knots. Both habits are made easier by slouching; both encourage the body to fold into itself, to bring the head down from its heights and bury itself into the chest and shoulders, to erase the body, to reject it. I’ve always comforted myself by believing that both habits are signs of extreme interior mental activity, habits of nervousness and anxiety and worry (all codes for intelligence, right?), habits that, like my constantly shaking right leg, are proof that I’m always thinking about things. Who needs this body when the mind is where the action is? Mutilate the shell to nourish the soul. Kill the body to feed the mind. Something like that.  [From “Slouch,” Guilt and Pleasure, Issue 5, Summer 2007]

In what ways are you the same or different from your younger self?

How often do you still take cues on how to behave from your parents?

Josh Kun is an author, academic and music critic who is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California.

Scholarship

By Nicole Spector

Every week it’s the same dream: I’m a sophomore in high school and I’ve missed nearly an entire semester of Miss MacDonald’s AP literature class. Now it’s finals time. My alarm clock is shrieking. I’ve got twenty minutes to get to school and also, to read with great scrutiny, several books. The list includes obvious classics like Crime & Punishment and Madam Bovary. I haven’t so much as cracked the cover of any of them. I’m devastated. How could I have been so irresponsible?

Inside the dream, I panic. Knowing Miss MacDonald, one of the school’s oldest teachers (she's been there at least four decades), she won't go easy on us. She'll test our familiarity with the works down to utter minutiae. She’ll want to know what Raskolnikov’s room is like — how many feet long? What novel helped shape Emma’s romantic ideals? There will be long essays to write on the spot and no multiple-choice questions.

I must find a way to postpone taking this exam.

But it's not just Miss MacDonald’s disappointment that gets me. It's a deeper sense of failure. I remember something that happened when I first met her. This happened in real life, in the life outside the dream, but I remember it within the dream. I remember arriving early to her first period class despite my aversion to the morning. I remember dropping in after school to ask questions to which I knew the answers. It wasn’t because I enjoyed the class, really. It was because it felt good to watch her pale gray eyes light up with my phony enthusiasm. I guess I thought I was doing some kind of good deed. I perceived her as a lonely person. What I was learning wasn't about Raskolnikov's room. It was about varying kinds of generosity and sacrifice. Is that a better lesson?

Today I looked her up. She died a few years ago. I also found an old report card. She’d given me an A-.    

What have you learned from books?

What have you learned from other people?

Nicole Spector is a writer and editor in New York. She is the author of Fifty Shades of Dorian Grey.

Scholarship

By Ben Greenman

Kids study history. They go to school and learn about numbers for math and words for literature, but then those two roads converge in history. The Battle of Hastings was 1066. The Civil War ran from 1861 to 1865. Man went to the moon in 1969. Those numbers yoked to words seem like layered facts. In fact they are the opposite.

I have a kid. That kid studied history. He took exams where he was required to recall dates and places, dates and names, dates and events. No matter whether he conquered them or they conquered him, those exams left him cold. “I did well, Dad,” he said, depositing the paper on the table for me to sign. “I didn’t do so well, Dad,” he said, depositing the paper on the table for me to sign.

I have another kid. That kid studied history. He did not take exams where he was required to recall dates and places, dates and names, dates and events. His teacher refashioned history as a glowing line that wound through different places, names, and events like a live wire. The date sat atop the line like a suggestion. That kid did not take many exams at all. He wrote papers where he was required to trace that glowing line. It made him glow as well, no matter whether he mastered them or they mastered him. “I wrote about Ivan Krasnov,” he said. “He was a general for the Cossacks who defended Tagnarog but he also wrote articles. I wrote like I was him for this paper.”

The two kids are the same kid. The first transformed beautifully into the second. The first is now history.

What is the best way to teach?

Is every student different?

Ben Greenman is a NYT-bestselling writer and a contributing writer to the New Yorker. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Bergen County.

Values

By Leah Umansky

As a child, my dad used to joke that the way to my heart was through my stomach. I’m in my mid-thirties and he still makes that joke.

I blame it on being two months premature, and being born at 2lbs 6oz, but nothing makes me happier than a cheeseburger or a steak.

As a single woman in her thirties, I’m on a few dating sites. There have been times I’ve been at a loss for what to write in my profile. “Teacher, poet, book lover”? “Teacher, poet, romantic, anglophile”? “Teacher, poet, romantic, anglophile, book snob carnivore”?

Finally, I settled on “I’m a teacher, and a poet. The way to my heart is steak and books.”

What I want people to know is that I’m not going to be a bird on our date and eat a goddamn salad.  How many men do you see who order salad at a bar on a date? Very few.

I remember back in college, a professor took me out for lunch to Applebee’s. I ordered the riblets, because they’re delicious. She ordered a salad.  

“Okay,” the server said. “One order of riblets and one small salad.”

I watched my professor shake her head, sigh, and toss back her long blonde hair.

“No,” she said. “I want the large salad. Don’t assume all women want the side salad.” 

A few years ago, my father stopped eating meat. I panicked. Who would take me out for steak on my birthday? 

A friend recently joked around with me, and said, “You’re a fancy poet who runs around Manhattan waiting for people to cook her meat.”

You know what, she’s sort of right.  

What is a societal value you have seen change during your lifetime?

What is a societal value you hope to see change?

Leah Umansky is a poet and teacher whose most recent collection is the Mad Men-themed chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream.

Values

By John Donohue

I recently saw a sticker on the frame of a subway exit gate. It was in big black letters against a white background: “Amplify Love/ Dissipate Hate,” it said.

Someone had stuck it at eye level. I figured it might have been better placed on an entry turnstile, to prepare commuters for the shoving, hustling, and petty inconveniences of a ride below ground. 

What I liked best about the sticker wasn’t stated explicitly—that we have a choice in how we act towards people. That may seem obvious, but it's anything but. Those choices are at the heart of what we think of as our values.

A friend’s aged and well-off mother-in-law still hates the man who lost $50,000 dollars of her husband’s investment forty years ago. She’s a devout Christian, and though a minister told her that forgiving the man would free her, she holds onto her bitterness and bile. I say that’s fine for her, because she clearly enjoys it. I choose to allow her that imperfection. 

As for me, I’m going to make a different choice about those who have wronged me. I'm not going to push back at them. I'm not going to judge them. I'm just going to leave them hanging in full view, like a sticker on a wall. Sometimes being seen for what you are is enough.

Where did you get your core values?

Do you think others should share your values?

John Donohue is a writer and editor in New York. He created the bestselling anthology Man With a Pan.

Balance

By Dan Crane

A few years ago, I had lunch with the guy who created MacGyver. No, he didn’t teach me how to defuse a bomb with a stick of bubblegum and a paperclip. He did, however, teach me something interesting about creativity and energy.

“Whenever I have a script to write,” he told me, “I’ll write a question on my whiteboard. For example: 'What happens in Act Three?' Or, 'How would MacGyver escape having to have lunch with this young man?'” 

I didn't know what to say to that. I said nothing.

“After that,” he said, “I’ll go build a model airplane.”

It might not surprise you to learn that the guy who created MacGyver builds fleets of model airplanes; but it might surprise you that he does it instead of writing scripts. Let me repeat: INSTEAD OF WRITING SCRIPTS.

He explained: The mind, he proclaimed, does its best creative work while at rest. Posing a question, then going away to do something else, was a way to level off, rest the mind, and let the subconscious take over. Basically, it’s like meditation—with the help of model airplane glue.

“It’s why people say they do their best thinking in the shower,” he said.

After our lunch, I went out and bought a model airplane. One day, I swear I’ll get around to building it.

Is there enough play in your work?

Is balance always about a thing and its opposite, or do side steps count?

Dan Crane is a journalist, author, comedian, host, musician, and retired competitive air-guitarist. He is the author of “To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist.”

Balance

By Alicia Van Couvering

I used to believe that honesty was all that mattered. Deep, raw, uncut vulnerability was the key to a fearless life, and should be encouraged in every interaction. So I let my tendency to overshare run wild. I never tried to impress anyone by buttoning up and staying composed; I only wanted to know them, and to make sure they knew me. I admitted my worst mistakes; I had no secrets; I had no strategy. It allowed me to skip the line of polite conversation and get right to the intimacy I craved. Executives would cry about their divorces at lunch; new friends would reveal it all. It was scary sometimes—I would leave a meeting shaken, unable to remember what I’d even said. What had possessed me to give it all away, as if the moment was holding me up at knife point, demanding that I lay everything on the table? Mostly I patted myself on the back: I was so vulnerable.

Here is what I’ve learned: Oversharing is not vulnerability. It breaks the ice violently. Real vulnerability, done right, is a gift to someone else: here, I gave you this, now you can give me something back, if you want to. Sharing yourself is only the first part of true vulnerability; standing back is the rest of it.

Is a life of balance an attainable goal?

How would I even know I led a balanced life last week?

Alicia Van Couvering is a movie producer whose films include Tiny Furniture, Drinking Buddies, and Junebug.

War

By Dan Fost

I’m wearing my orange jersey, and the cap with the orange bill. My son has the same jersey and the same cap, along with his glove, scorebook, pencil, and sports section. A throng of similarly dressed people surrounds us in the stadium. We are among our tribe.

Our tribe is the San Francisco Giants. When you’re a sports fan, you are absolutely part of a tribe. Whether you identify as a Giant, a Warrior, a Lion or a Brave, whether you wear orange, blue, or black, you are among your kind. You high-five strangers. You bask in the glory of your team after victories. You suffer when they lose. You have slogans that carry you further into your sense of togetherness: “We are Giants.” “This is Our Time.” “Better Together.”

Primitive humans relied on their tribe for food, shelter, and protection from danger. In more recent centuries, tribes cut across racial, ethnic or religious lines. That’s still out there, even at the ballgame, when we sing the national anthem.

But mostly, we’re lucky to live in this time and place. We’re not fighting other tribes for our lives, but merely for our entertainment. We’re satisfying a primal need, and no one gets hurt. 

Except the guys in Dodger blue.

What tribes do you belong to and what, if anything, do they bring to your life?

Do you change uniforms often?

Dan Fost is a veteran journalist who has written about everything from technology to politics. He is the author of two books about the San Francisco Giants, Giants Baseball Experience and Giants, Past and Present.

War

By David Bezmozgis

It is impossible for me to separate my grandfather’s death from the war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006. In my mind, the two tragedies are wedded together, or at least proceed in parallel. My grandfather seemed to relinquish his last hold on life when the rockets started falling on Kiryat Shmona and Haifa. It was around this time that he started to slip in and out of lucidity. What had before been a resigned or willful silence became something remote and otherworldly. Three times a day, either Nadja or a nurse would succeed in penetrating his stupor to give him food, which he accepted obediently or instinctively, like a baby bird. Otherwise, he drifted. We would stand at his bedside and watch his chest rise and fall with surprising regularity. Occasionally, and totally unpredictably, he would emerge from his stupor for a morning or an afternoon and regard us with comprehension and clarity. In these rare moments, we peppered him with dull questions but said not a word about Israel, the war, the catastrophe that flickered nonstop on television in the other room. We didn’t want to upset him, but by keeping the war from him I felt that we were severing his last meaningful connection to the world. Now that we could no longer talk to him about Israel, we could no longer talk to him at all.

Is there anything you would go to war for?

What are you not telling someone for fear of upsetting them?

David Bezmozgis is an award-winning author and filmmaker whose books include Natasha And Other Stories and The Betrayers. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, and elsewhere.

Power

By Janine Avril

People say that knowledge is power, but it’s more complicated than that. In the not so distant future, my future mother-in-law, Ellen, will learn whether she has the BRCA mutation—the BRCA is a tumor-suppression gene, and a mutation greatly increases the chance of breast cancer or ovarian cancer. Ellen, who suffered a bout of breast cancer last year and lost her own mother—a Holocaust survivor—to breast cancer, is boundlessly nervous about this information. In truth, if she had it her way, she would not have been tested for the gene at all. She is the type of person who would prefer the bliss of not-knowing. Yet, she chose to do the testing last week.

Ellen has two daughters, my future sister-in-law Amy and my partner Heidi. The possibility of BRCA has power over them in different ways. If Amy, a mother of three young children, learns she has BRCA, she would go to the extreme. She has already said so. She would preserve herself by removing any potentially affected body parts. Heidi, several years younger, has a different philosophy. She wants to have children eventually and holds out hope of breastfeeding them. She would rather wait to test for the gene until after she has children. Modern medicine can tell us what might be in our cards, but it cannot tell us how to play our hand.

I am just a bystander at the moment. I am not officially in this family yet. I have my own theories about what people should do, but they are just theories. Is knowledge power, or is it powerlessness?

How often do you feel powerless? 

What's the relationship between power and control in your life?

Janine Avril is the author of the memoir Nightlight.

Power

By Steve Goldbloom

Like most people, I seem more fun on the Internet.

Have you ever considered how many hours we devote to filters, tags, likes, shares and other virtual currencies of validation?

I barely remember who I was before mobile technology—how I killed time between moments. I miss the spark of imagination that comes from being bored.

Being bored is a lost art now. Same goes for observing and listening. I mean really listening to people, especially strangers.

I miss being scared at parties, without the aid of a gadget to look busy.

My parents forbade me from going to a friend’s house to play video games. Now kids stay in and watch people they’ve never met play video games.

When did sharing an experience become more valuable than experiencing it?

You could say technology has created a culture of convenience. But you have to admit, it has turned us into an odd bunch.

The other day I had to double park my Prius for a minute so I flicked on the flashers and pulled over. In seconds, a strange woman opened the door and piled into the back seat.

She looked up from her phone and said “Oh, you’re not the Uber.” “No,” I said. “I am not Uber.”

Next time, I think I’ll keep going, if only to see who breaks first.

In your own struggle with technology, who or what is winning? 

Does technology increase or decrease your personal power?

Steve Goldbloom is a writer, producer, and performer best known for creating and starring in the PBS comedy series Everything But the News (2014).

Food

By Pauls Toutonghi

I’ve been staring at babies a lot, lately.  

My wife gave birth to twins. The house is full of howling and giggling at all hours of the day and night.  

The babies make noise, too.  

But since the noise they make is not English noise, I have to admit that I’ve started to wonder what they’re thinking. And they clearly are thinking. Here’s a list of what I’ve noticed that they perceive: Hunger, joy, panic, satisfaction, pain, excitement, sleepiness, wonder.  

These emotions are clear; there’s no doubt when they’re hungry, happy, or sleepy. They are not shy. As Woody Guthrie sang to little Arlo Guthrie so many years ago: “I want my milk and I want it now.”  

But there’s one thing that my children don’t yet seem to do. They don’t remember. 

I have no memories from when I was an infant. And I’m always suspicious of people who have them—no matter how stridently they insist that they can close their eyes and see, vividly see, the color of their nursery walls. I just don’t buy it. I think they’ve built that memory as adults. They’ve sneaked into the citadel and planted the seed of the memory, themselves. We learn to remember at about the same time we learn to speak, I think.

What’s something that happened this week you’d like to keep as a memory?

Pauls Toutonghi's next book is True North, the true story of a family's search for its lost dog. It will be published by Knopf in 2016.