packets of sugar, artificial sweetener, and nondairy creamer. Eight Oâ Clock coffee in Christmasy-looking envelopes of tinselly red and green. He tears one open. The ground coffee is packed in a round, white filter, like a doll-sized cushion. He puts this, along with water, into the coffeemaker, and it begins brewing with a congested noise. The contents of the orientation package he picked up the previous day are spread over the table by the windowâvenue maps and drink vouchers and announcements of added or changed weekend seminars, a seven-page schedule of events that conjures visions of exhausted alumni, some with canes and walkers, lurching from breakfast meetings to round-tables to picnic lunches to step singing (
What
is step singing? Could it
be singing on steps? Which steps? Surely not those big stone library steps
); memorial services; guided tours of advances in veterinary science; panels; lectures; and God knows what else. The only important thing in the package is the
Class of 1979 25th Reunion Book.
Big black letters on a glossy red cover. Cumbersome and unwieldy as a phone book, it has torn its way out of its shrink-wrap, crumpled and mashed its self-congratulatory cover letter.
Here is the story of your classâyour struggles and your triumphs, your
journeys from promise into fulfillment . . .
Who writes this drivel? Will balls up the letter and drops it in the trash can. Along with all the other members of Cornellâs graduating class of 1979, Will had been invited to contribute his dispatch from midlifeâ
Dear
William Moreland, We want to hear from you!
And Will had drafted and redrafted and drafted once more his condensed (No more than 500 words, please!) autobiography, dividing himself into professional and personal; into husband and father; into brain, body, heart; into year twenty-three, year twenty-four, year twenty-five; into grad student, intern, resident, private practitioner; into citizen and consumer; into into into. There were any number of ways to dismantle himself, but how was he to reassemble his parts into a narrative, a string of words from here to there?
By default, Will became one of the 687 members of his class who didnât contribute to the reunion book, 89 of those having died, 161 âmissing,â and the rest like himself, he guesses, unable or even unwilling to account for themselves in the form of an essay or a timeline or a résumé illustrated with photographs of children, pets, vacation homes, and fancy cars. Unlike his brotherâs résumé, rendered in ten-point type to accommodate all his accomplishments, Willâs is two lines long: his name followed by what few facts the university has acquired about him since graduation. Ph.D., Psych., Columbia University, 1986; Married to Carole Laski, June 28, 1989; Children, Luke Michael, March 30, 1990; Samantha Jane, October 10, 1996. Member NAAP, APA, NYPA.
So there he is: educated, employed, married, the father of two children. And, like most men within his experience, either as a friend or psychoanalyst, a man transformed by fatherhood as he could not have been by any school or career or woman. Take the arrival of his daughter: wet and naked, arms thrown wide with the shock of her first breath, still tethered to her mother by a glistening rope of blood. Even now, this moment, how clearly he can see it, the blue and purple vessels bound together in an almost iridescent membrane, slippery and hotâthe heat of it against his palm. He cut as directed and then found he didnât want to let it go. Wasnât it a thing too splendid, too holy, even, to burn in a hospital incinerator?
Eight years, almost, since that day, and yet even a familiar glimpse of his daughter can still catch him off guard, grab him with the force of a hand at his throat. The intensity of her concentration when she skips rope, for example, and the way her skinny arms cross at the elbows when she does some of her fancier
What
is step singing? Could it
be singing on steps? Which steps? Surely not those big stone library steps
); memorial services; guided tours of advances in veterinary science; panels; lectures; and God knows what else. The only important thing in the package is the
Class of 1979 25th Reunion Book.
Big black letters on a glossy red cover. Cumbersome and unwieldy as a phone book, it has torn its way out of its shrink-wrap, crumpled and mashed its self-congratulatory cover letter.
Here is the story of your classâyour struggles and your triumphs, your
journeys from promise into fulfillment . . .
Who writes this drivel? Will balls up the letter and drops it in the trash can. Along with all the other members of Cornellâs graduating class of 1979, Will had been invited to contribute his dispatch from midlifeâ
Dear
William Moreland, We want to hear from you!
And Will had drafted and redrafted and drafted once more his condensed (No more than 500 words, please!) autobiography, dividing himself into professional and personal; into husband and father; into brain, body, heart; into year twenty-three, year twenty-four, year twenty-five; into grad student, intern, resident, private practitioner; into citizen and consumer; into into into. There were any number of ways to dismantle himself, but how was he to reassemble his parts into a narrative, a string of words from here to there?
By default, Will became one of the 687 members of his class who didnât contribute to the reunion book, 89 of those having died, 161 âmissing,â and the rest like himself, he guesses, unable or even unwilling to account for themselves in the form of an essay or a timeline or a résumé illustrated with photographs of children, pets, vacation homes, and fancy cars. Unlike his brotherâs résumé, rendered in ten-point type to accommodate all his accomplishments, Willâs is two lines long: his name followed by what few facts the university has acquired about him since graduation. Ph.D., Psych., Columbia University, 1986; Married to Carole Laski, June 28, 1989; Children, Luke Michael, March 30, 1990; Samantha Jane, October 10, 1996. Member NAAP, APA, NYPA.
So there he is: educated, employed, married, the father of two children. And, like most men within his experience, either as a friend or psychoanalyst, a man transformed by fatherhood as he could not have been by any school or career or woman. Take the arrival of his daughter: wet and naked, arms thrown wide with the shock of her first breath, still tethered to her mother by a glistening rope of blood. Even now, this moment, how clearly he can see it, the blue and purple vessels bound together in an almost iridescent membrane, slippery and hotâthe heat of it against his palm. He cut as directed and then found he didnât want to let it go. Wasnât it a thing too splendid, too holy, even, to burn in a hospital incinerator?
Eight years, almost, since that day, and yet even a familiar glimpse of his daughter can still catch him off guard, grab him with the force of a hand at his throat. The intensity of her concentration when she skips rope, for example, and the way her skinny arms cross at the elbows when she does some of her fancier
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