"For even saintly folk will act like sinners / unless they have their customary dinners."  Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera   We decide to celebrate the Fourth of July at Parker's Dam ... [+]

My father was a doctor. We never got the doctoring bug. He never spoke to us about medicine. Instead, he took us on road trips and taught us to play catch, even me. When we were little, he would read ... [+]

When we awoke, we found a great curtain of linked metal rungs had been lowered to earth from the sky. The chain mail drape connected land and sky and ran as far the eye could see, across the ocean ... [+]