Almost 20 years later, I landed another job at another community paper. This one was in Yellow Springs, Ohio — perhaps you’ve heard of it — and the paper was well over 100 years old, with Quaker roots.

Each of us has one life. It flows into us at birth and out of us at death. Life keeps on flowing, of course, but the particularity and shape of our one life is gone.

The best poem I’ll ever write is the one I’ll never write. It’s the one I’ll write only in my head, under the influence of bicycling, which apparently is for me as potent as the more illicit highs other writers have pursued for inspiration.

The day begins with tree shadow, with bird song, with a rectangle of grey on the slanted ceiling that slowly warms to blue. The top of a spruce floats there, and the ghost of the crabapple cut down this spring.

Sometimes when a story touches on the very spots I most wish to avoid, something else occurs. Rather than fuzzing my reception, the story’s nearness to my own experience seems to open a channel for really hearing.

My legs were pumping at a rate that suggested the Rabbit’s “I’m late, I’m late!” more than the dreamy, psychedelically mellowed Caterpillar. Every time I noticed how fast I was going, I slowed down. That’s all you can really do: notice, and let your grip go.

More reliably than memory, writing holds the trace of who you were and are. Often this is talked about in terms of measuring the distance between the two.

Time was wrinkling. I was leaving one party and stepping into another, long past.