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The List on the Refrigerator

Every kitchen has some version of it: the list on the refrigerator, held up by a magnet from a pizza place that closed two summers ago. Call the dentist. Eggs. A birthday card for Ruth. Renew the plates. Each line is a small promise pointed at the future, and each line will be crossed off or quietly rewritten next week. Now ask a different question about the same kitchen: what is the refrigerator for? That answer hasn’t changed in decades and won’t change with the list. The list is intention. The humming box behind it is purpose.

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Pillar of Salt

Genesis records the first health warning about sodium. Lot’s wife, fleeing the burning city, looks back and turns into a pillar of salt. Read it as a warning about attachment, about the price of facing the wrong direction. Then read it as prophecy. Three thousand years later, a whole food supply did the same thing to its eaters. We became the preserved: cured, brined, and held in place by the leading cause of death in the country.

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Love’s Best Habit: On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138

Ask a room of readers which of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the greatest and the same three answers come back every time: Sonnet 18, the summer’s day; Sonnet 116, the marriage of true minds; Sonnet 73, the yellow leaves. Those answers are accurate the way election returns are accurate. Ask which sonnet is the most beautiful and the most honest at once, and the room goes quiet, because that question is a confession booth. What comes back tells you what the reader wants and what the reader is willing to admit. Mine now is Sonnet 138, the one that begins with a woman swearing and a man pretending. I say now because it was not always so, and I would not trust a reader whose answer never changes. The road here runs through changes in tone and taste, in wants and abilities, in hopes I no longer have, and the road is the subject of this essay. A reader’s favorite sonnet is a diary entry with the lock broken off.

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The Empty Quad

This is move-in week at the American university, and I keep thinking about the freshmen. They were born in 2008, most of them, into the autumn the economy fell through the floor. Their parents signed leases in August and watched the banks fail in September, and a fair number of the classmates who should have been hauling suitcases up the dormitory stairs beside them do not exist. American births peaked in 2007, sagged with the crash, and never came back. The recession officially ended in 2009. The births did not return with the recovery, and the fertility rate has since sunk to its lowest marks ever recorded. Economists can argue about why, and they do, everything from housing costs to delayed marriage to a general gloom about what was coming next. Whatever the cause, the count kept falling, and the count is all a registrar needs. The empty crib has been rolling toward the campus gates for eighteen years, and this semester it arrives.

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Landlocked on Purpose

In the fall of 1922, Aldo Leopold and his brother Carl paddled a canoe into the delta of the Colorado River and found a wilderness of green lagoons, a hundred channels braiding through two million acres of cottonwood and willow, egrets standing in the shallows, deer in the cane, and somewhere beyond the firelight the jaguar they never saw and never stopped feeling. Leopold wrote about that trip a quarter century later and confessed that he never went back. He preferred the delta as memory held it, because he understood what was coming for it. He was right to stay away. In November of that same year, in a lodge outside Santa Fe, commissioners from seven states signed the Colorado River Compact and divided the river on paper. The canoe and the signature belong in the same paragraph because one of them canceled the other.

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Raise Your Right Hand: The Blind Oath

First, swear. Then we will tell you what you are accused of. Sit with that order of operations for a moment, because the order is the whole instrument. A man is summoned before the court. He is not told the charge, because there might be no charge to tell. The summons brings him in, the book is offered, and the oath is administered before any indictment is read: swear to answer truthfully every question this court intends to put to you. After that, if anything is coming, it comes inside the interrogatories he has just sworn to answer. He has pledged his answers before the questions exist.

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You Have to Drink Hot

The building had a service corridor on the ground floor, and at the end of it a room about the size of a closet with a hot plate, a percolator, and a folding chair that had been repaired with wire. The man who kept the building running sat in that chair most afternoons. He was older than my father, Black, raised in the South, and he had been doing the work long enough that tenants asked him about the boiler before they called the managing agent. On the worst afternoon of that summer I came through with an iced coffee going soft in my hand, the cup so wet it kept trying to leave my fingers, and he was sitting there holding a mug with steam coming off the top of it.

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