Scene 1: My son snagged a parking spot to crow about, smack in front of his row house in inner-city Philadelphia. Around 1 a.m. his housemate woke him: “Bro! Your car’s on fire.” Turns out a trash can was burning on the curb by his vehicle. It sure looked weird when it was over—the hood and half the passenger side of his once-proud wheels skinned and bubbled like an escapee of Hitler’s scorched-earth retreat from the Eastern front.

Whenever I’m driving through unfamiliar urban terrain, the same line from the Bible comes to mind. I don’t have to conjure it; it just comes “as the sparks fly upward,” to quote Job. Here it is: “In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune.”

Not very lofty, right? Not “The Lord is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1), or “He will command his angels concerning you to guard you” (Psalm 91:11).

My father gave me my first tip on writing. His own writing was limited to the jotting of room measurements for the installation of carpets and linoleum. While all he did was run a furniture store, I, at the tender age of 10, was being asked to return to school the next morning with a composition. I understand they don’t call them compositions anymore.

Sometimes I wish my editors would assign me a specific topic to talk about on this penultimate page of the magazine, but they don’t, and neither did Soeur Jeanne de Valois. Hence my terror, then and now. 

On a recent Saturday, I didn’t speak to my husband for a whole day. Something had happened that triggered memories from our first year of dating, fanning a dusty cloud of hurts and wounds that I had assumed were long ago swept away. But no, there they were, settled in the dark corners of my heart, and all it took was one forceful blow to blast them out into the open. 

A memory of my mother and my childhood self in an Oriental garden in a queue of tourists instructed to take turns striking a Buddhist gong with a heavy mallet: once for wisdom, twice for beauty, or thrice for money: Mom strikes three times, and a titter runs through the crowd.

Wisdom is a joke in the prime of life: “Fools despise wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). By the word “despise” imagine something not even rising to the level of intense hatred but a casual discounting.

There’s a popular Korean saying that I always heard growing up: “You can’t spit at a smiling face.” I’ve never spat in anyone’s face before, smiling or scowling, but I did notice this: I can never seem to despise someone enjoying a popsicle. 

My father finds it amusing that I keep a collection of walking sticks hidden behind a tree stump near the wrought iron gate to the wooded cemetery where we walk each day. You don’t need it, he is thinking, and even he in his 96th year elects to be a biped, not tri-ped, for as long as he is able.

To his puzzlement regarding my enamorment of shards of American sycamore branches that line our winding way I give the same reply each time: I like the feel of them, both in my hand and as they scrape the road below and make an earthy sound and ground me in creation.