1. Twelve weeks into my two-semester teaching gig in Italy, my phone rang at five AM. Half-asleep, I reached over and grabbed it from the bedside table, the ID said it was my wife. Although I answered the call with my thumb immediately, I had to groggily untangle it from the nest of cords and books and glasses…so it was a few seconds before I could get it to my ear. I could hear movement, regular rhythmic movement. “Hello...

“Don’t get mad,” was the first thing she said when I answered my wife’s phone call. That’s one command that has the certain and opposite effect. Immediately, my blood pressure squeezed up and I clenched my jaw. I had had a week. My car wouldn’t start on Tuesday morning and I had to have it towed to the mechanic. One of my students handed in a paper on Wednesday that was mostly plagiarized and then had his mother call to s...

“If we ever do this again,” I thought, as I scanned the lobby, “I’ll find a hotel where I can be alone somewhere other than my room.” ( . )( . ) Lillith had insisted on coming to a restaurant in a little inn in the next town over from ours. When we first moved here, we used to come here from time to time, but we had grown a little stale on the menu and we hadn’t been back in years. This afternoon, though, Lillith had text...