From the ground, Benjamin lunged at his brother's legs, and David went down on his back. David got a leg free and started kicking Benjamin on the top of his head with the heel of his shoe. He kicked until he felt Benjamin go slack.

I was walking around Stanley Park, talking with my homegirl about everything. Then she asks me, apropos of nothing, if I’d ever been in a fight. Es is cool, but she’s a private schooler/Ivy Leaguer, and I doubt that she’s ever slugged it out with anybody, so maybe she wanted to live vicariously through her friend who grew up in the barrio.

On Fridays, my writer sits next to me, lawyer-style, whispering suggestions for jokes and witty comments into my ear or handing me legal pads on which he’s furiously scribbled funny lines. Then if I stiff, I can blame him, throw a tantrum (talent can be so moody sometimes), fire him, tell him he’ll never work again, bad-mouth him all over town, say he's a thieving cokehead, try to write new material myself, fail miserably, call and beg him to come back, and then pretend that nothing ever happened.

This wasn't just a song being sung, but a story being told, full of specific, writerly details. Early on the narrator brings the girl a gift of a flowerlike herb called goldenrod, placing the season as late summer. By early spring, she succumbs to the cancer that's invaded her bones, and on the day she dies, a cardinal crashes into her hospital window.

His wife wasn't talking, was standing a little bit behind him with her head down. She wore a long, faded, purple and burgundy long-sleeved dress, and she had a blue scarf tied around her head. Benjamin could see her sneakered feet under the gate. He was surprised that they weren't carrying a picture with them, but then he realized that they probably didn't have a picture of their child.

My homegirl is dropping hot fire on her blog, as usual, and, on today's post, I got name-checked.

Neither David nor Benjamin had ever been tested. They had managed to get through their lives without ever having to make a decision that would change everything—how they would view their pasts and their futures, how and what they thought of themselves and each other. They had gotten off free.

1999. I was back in Madtown, watching baseball with my dad and reading a really lousy poem in a literary journal, a pen in my hand. The poem made me think of a friend of mine from grad school because I knew that she would have disliked the poem, too.

Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico. Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

I’m worried that if I start with the reflection that I’ll trap myself in the past when the past is past and it is the future that I need to get through. Why start with the nostalgia so soon after the events for which I will probably become too nostalgic?