I’m not sure when I read Raymond Carver for the first time. I know he was he was still alive. I looked forward to new stories in Esquire and The New Yorker. Then he died of lung cancer. He was only fifty. I suspect he lived as his protagonists did—antsy, struggling, hoping for a break, smoking and drinking heavily, life never what they wanted.

I was twenty-seven when Carver died. By the time I turned thirty I had read all his stories, many two or three times. I tried reading Carver’s poetry...

In a few months, I’ll be sixty-five years old. There are some days I feel it more than others. Those days are becoming more common. Among some of the old-age changes in me I’ve notice are I’m slower and less energetic than I once was. I’m also less bothered or concerned about things of little or no consequence. I wouldn’t call it apathy but more like ambivalence. Or maybe it’s more readily recognizing what’s consequential and what is not. The list of what is not grows larger.

While the...

I got through high school reading what was assigned with little thought of why. Not that I read much before then. Middle school is a blank. I don’t remember anything I read. Elementary? I remember Ms. Illyes, my sixth grade teacher reading Tom Sawyer to the class. She read a chapter or two a day. We listened. I loved it. It was better than television… and I loved television more than anything. By high school, reading was done to get by....