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In this week’s essay, Yuan Changming ponders the costs and the benefits at the intersection of life difficulties and artistic output.
Weekly Featured Essay
The Fortunate Failure: A Triptych of the Senior Wordsmith
by Yuan Changming
I. The Fox in the Stone
In the humid, historical air of Jingzhou, our common native place, we lay spent. As Hua stirred, I felt the sudden, familiar urge to bridge the gap between our physical intimacy and the “biological stillness” of the page. In the dim light, she looked like a mum blooming on a foggy morning—an enchanting fox spirit from the folk legends of our youth, a sight for my sore eyes that snapped my soul into her hand.
“I want to take a picture of you like this,” I blurted out. “So you can see how you look when you’re most beautiful.”
She refused. A photo, she claimed, was “hard evidence” of an infidelity she was currently masking as a high school reunion. She waved her head, her long neck throwing shadows against the headboard of our hotel room.
“So, only I have the privilege to feast my eyes on your foxiest looks?”
“As long as you’re happy,” she whispered.
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My First Birding Buddy
by Chandramika Nath
The first friend I ever made had feathers.
My father introduced us.
Every morning of my childhood began with the same sound—cheep-cheep-cheep. Before the village stirred awake, before smoke rose from kitchen fires, the house sparrows had already begun their day. Their nests were tucked beneath the roof of our Lakshmi Narayan temple, and their songs spilled into our courtyard like music.
Deuta never needed an alarm clock. The sparrows were enough.
With a cup of tea in one hand and a handful of grains in the other, he would step into the courtyard and scatter food across the ground. Within seconds, our little band of sparrows would arrive, fluttering down to share their morning meal. I would run after him, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, and together we would watch our little guests eat their breakfast.
One winter morning, I remember asking why the sparrows came to our house every day.
Deuta smiled and said, “Because they know they are welcome here.”
At the time, I thought he was talking only about birds.
Dead Heat: The Race Jim DeMoss Engineered
by Curtis C. Morgan
I didn’t know it yet, but in the spring of 1961 I was about to get a lesson in coaching strategy that would take me sixty years to fully digest. I was a college runner at Butler University in Indianapolis—in shape, I thought, real shape—and I had returned to my old high school, Northwood in the D.C. suburbs, where I had finished fourth in the state 880 yards the previous year. Coach Jim DeMoss was running his team through spring practice, and he spotted me standing at the edge of the track.
“Why don’t you run an 880 with Buzz and Tom?” he said.
Buzz Lawlor and Tom Rabenhorst were sophomores. I was a college runner on a track scholarship. I said sure.
Overconfidence was about to bite me on the hind parts. More precisely, I didn’t know what Jim DeMoss had already seen in those two boys—and what he was about to show them about themselves.
Parade Life
by Kate Farrell
For as long as I can remember, my father has assured me that the Fourth of July parade in our hometown is a celebration of my birthday, one day early. I am ten and stand breathless on the curb of our main street, watching our high school marching band play.
Dad puts a flag in my hand and says, “Don’t forget to thank them!” He’s swallowed into a circle of neighbors who slap him on the back and laugh about stories I can’t hear.
The majorette tosses her baton in the air, blows her whistle, then points right at me when she catches it. I wave my flag and am thrilled to have a summer birthday.
Dad can do anything. He leads the congregation in song every week at the ten o’clock Mass. He’s never off-key. He gets a perfect score when he and I do “How to Increase your Word Power” as soon as the Reader’s Digest arrives. I believe him when he tells me freckles are a sign of beauty and when he was disappointed in me when I took five puffs of a Virginia Slims 100 with my cousin.
ASD: Awe-some Delight
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
We watched autism long before we recognized it. When Andrew was a toddler, he’d been spinning objects for half his life, and he was a phenomenon. He favored the colorful, plastic doughnuts that children stack by size on a rocking white column, but he wasn’t a stacker. Instead, he crawled forward, spinning rings on the entryway tile of our Tempe house, mesmerized by their sound, vibration, movement, color, and by the air on his face. He’d do this for hours until we stopped him. Andrew worked on his technique and learned to launch the perfect spin with his fingers, appreciating all of its subtle variations. If Andrew couldn’t find rings, he spun coins, cups, plates, and the lids of pots from our kitchen cabinet. He once spun a baby doll on its head. Years later, I related my experiences to a mom whose autistic son tried spinning an abandoned car tire in their weedy backyard.
Andrew walked on his hands and feet, his bottom in the air like a soft, padded hinge. Sometimes, he would go forward, sometimes backward, sometimes in a circle, looking back between his legs to see if he’d left a “twiddle toy” behind. He was constantly in motion, his thick hair swinging like a spangled gold curtain above his eyes, dark as embers. I would find him, grab him, and squeeze him tight. Andrew would laugh and sometimes stiffen his body and shake, so we called him Franken-baby. We also called him Thunder-thighs because of his delicious, plump, dimpled legs. Andrew now uses Thunder-thighs and Franken-baby as computer usernames. Who knew he was listening back then?
Just as Important
by Steffi Gauguet
The cardiac ICU phone buzzed on my hip. Again. Relentless. All the time. This time, a text from the nurse in Room 804. Again. THIS MOTHER REALLY WANTS TO TALK TO YOU. NOW.
All caps. Again.
ASAP, I sent back. I meant it. I really wanted to talk to her, too. She was concerned about her seven-year-old son being in too much pain. He had undergone a coarctation of the aorta repair the day prior. In comparison to what most of the other patients in this unit were going through, this was peanuts. He was extubated, awake, alert. His heart was working great, his blood pressure acceptable. All was good as far as his survival was concerned, unlike many of his neighboring patients in the cardiac ICU. They were all my patients. And as their doctor, a pediatric intensive care fellow in training, it was my job to take care of them all, as best as I could. No, better said, as best as they deserved. Not easily reconcilable standards.
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