There are people in our lives whose influence is significant but fleeting. They’re there one moment, often at an opportune one, then they’re gone. Their presence and absence are a sequitur to something more lasting.

Coach Jim Petty was one of those people for me.

I read the news of his disappearance on Facebook. A FB friend had posted a link. Coach Petty’s truck, swept away by “swift-moving water,” was gone, with him in it. It wouldn’t be found for another week. He was still in it, submerged...

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...