Human Experience
Database
Facts are well documented. Human experience is not. Leave something real for the generations that come after you.
"Like a guest book of life."
14 experiences and counting
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story by Hamilton
Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story by Hamilton Let me tell you what I wish I’d known When I was young and dreamed of glory: You have no control: Who lives, who dies, who tells your stor
The Day My Father Stopped Talking
My father was a man who filled every room he walked into. He had a story for everything and an opinion on the rest. Then one morning in his seventy-third year, he had a small stroke — the doctors call
Arriving in a Country Where You Don't Know the Word for Cold
I came from a place where the coldest it ever got was what you'd call a cool evening. When I arrived in Canada in November, I did not own a proper coat. I thought I owned a coat. I did not. The first
What the Depression Taught My Grandmother About Enough
She kept the rubber bands from the newspaper and the twist ties from bread bags in a drawer in the kitchen. When she died, we found forty years of them in there — rubber bands gone brittle, twist ties
The Apology I Waited Thirty Years to Give
In school I was unkind to a boy in my class. Not in a dramatic way — no single incident I can point to. Just the slow drip of exclusion, of a turned back, of making sure he knew he was on the outside
Learning to Read at Fifty-Three
I hid it my whole life. You learn to hide it. You memorize menus at restaurants you go to regularly. You ask your wife to read you things, pretending you left your glasses somewhere. You sign things w
The Stranger on the Train Who Said Exactly the Right Thing
I was twenty-four and having the kind of silent crisis that's invisible from the outside. Job falling apart. Relationship ending. The particular feeling of having constructed a version of your life th
My Mother's Hands
She was a seamstress for forty years. If you looked at her hands, you could see it — the calluses at the fingertips, the small scars from pins and needles, the way her fingers moved even when she was
The Year I Lived Without Electricity
It was not a choice, at first. The bill went unpaid for long enough that they cut it off, and I didn't have the money to get it back on. I was twenty-nine and I'd made a long series of decisions that
Watching My Son Figure Out the World
He is four. At four, everything is being discovered for the first time, constantly, by a person who has no filter on his astonishment. He noticed shadows for what seemed like the first time last week
The Job Interview Where I Told the Truth
I had been lying in job interviews for six years. Not big lies — the standard lies. That I was passionate about the company. That I worked best under pressure. That my greatest weakness was that I car
My Grandmother's Recipe for Nothing in Particular
She never wrote anything down. When I asked her to show me how she made her rice — the one dish that I have never been able to replicate, in twenty years of trying — she stood at the stove and added t
The Night I Almost Didn't Call
It was nothing, really. I was having a bad week. I picked up my phone to call a friend and then thought: it's late, he's probably busy, it's not that serious, I'll be fine tomorrow. I put the phone d