Writing

I played baseball for seven years as a kid. Like many, I had dreams of playing in the big leagues one day. It helped that it was the early 1970s, and I was a big Cincinnati Reds fan. The Big Red Machine. I had family in Newport, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. I was born a Reds’ fan. As a player, I fashioned myself a budding Joe Morgan.

I wasn’t fast or strong, so hitting the ball hard or far wasn’t my forte. And I wasn’t going to steal many bases. So much for being like Joe. I had...

When I was a freshman in high school, I had two new teachers who quit soon after starting. One was student teaching in my U.S. history class. From day one, he struggled. He left after two weeks. The other was a newly licensed mathematics teacher. Mr. Richards taught a first-period algebra class, which, along with a few of us freshmen, included a large group of juniors and seniors taking the course for the second or third time. We managed to drive Mr. Richards away after about six weeks. By...

Freddy Manfred was three years older than me. Wiry, thick black hair, and dark eyes, his natural expression was a smile. His cheeks would puff out, eyes narrow, and teeth seemly grow larger. As far as I could tell, though, he had no friends. He was always outside, in his barn or orchard, but never really doing anything. He didn’t have toys or interests other than being in the world, an observer of everything.

That’s a seven-year-old’s perspective, which was how old I was when we met. Freddy...

We left the basketball game early to be beat the crowd to McDonald’s. Phil, my best friend since fourth grade, said we could cut through the park and across the railroad trestle. It would get us to the restaurant before the others, possibly even before the game ended and everyone in the gym headed for fast-food row.

The first weekends of...

When I was young, I was anxious. If you had asked me, say when I was ten, eleven, or even sixteen, I wouldn’t have understood what you were talking about. “Me, anxious? No way.” However, tracking backward from now, there were signs. And looking at my twelve-year-old daughter, there are similar ways of being we share. She has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety. I wasn’t.

My adolescence was defined by three traits: I was reclusive; I was a jokester; and I was a runner. The latter was of the...

I can’t imagine living anywhere that is not near water. I grew up a short distance from a river—the White River, which empties into the Wabash River, which empties into the Ohio, which empties into the Mississippi, and finally, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The river represented the possibility of floating away, leaving behind everything and going someplace else. The rhythm of water, consistent, moving, and full of possibility, has offered deliverance since I was six years old.

The...

When I was young I loved to fish. In my hometown, there was a reservoir. It was Indianapolis’s water supply. All through grade school and middle school, I fished along its banks as often as I could. Every once and a while, my stepdad took me out in his skiff, and we’d fish the little inlets along the north end of the reservoir. This was before they started building lake houses and people started claiming ownership of the shoreline.

We’d also run trout lines, but often, especially after my...

I hate the wind. I hate it with a passion, and it has been that way forever

As an 11-year-old, I would ride my bike along country roads, as torrents of wind swept across fallow fields. I struggled to stay upright and keep my tear-stung eyes open. How often this happened, I don’t know. Once, a thousand times, it does not matter. I remember it.

I remember, too, setting aside my bike to run when I turned fourteen. I had caught the attention of the track coach, and his attention alone was enough to...

As a child, there was little I was good at. That wasn’t my conclusion. Other people—peers, teachers, stepparents—insinuated as much, stepparents foremost. The exception that proved the rule was lawnmowing. In this, I was second to none. No one argued that. And it saved my life.

I began mowing lawns when I was seven, four years before my life was completely upended. My mom moved a hundred miles away when I was eleven, believing I was better off with my stepdad, whom she had decided she was...

Boys are loud. They play rough, need space, can’t be faulted for being the way they are. Girls, well, we don’t need to talk about them. They just are. You know how they are. They want to please. They want to have fun, but as soon as you cross them, annoy them, get the least bit rough with them, they cry.

“So why are you so quiet?” my stepdad asked me.

“Why are you so sensitive?”

I was raised watching men have their way with women, and women seeming to cling to them. We were tough,...