natesaint

     I acutely remember the shame I felt on my third day of work at Pizza Place. It seemed that I could get nothing right: absolutely everything was going wrong.     Working in a restaurant, there are about a half a million things that you have to know to do your job well. In my single, one-hour training session prior to starting the job, I had been told about a quarter million of those things, and I was expected to remember every single one of them. Of course, this was incredibly unrealistic, but that didn’t stop my face and head from getting hot at every fresh mistake—Welcome to Pizza Place! Screw-ups served fresh daily!

     It was my mother's step-father, my Grandpa Ray. His incorrigible smoking did him in, causing a fatal heart attack. All I remember of the incident was going into the kitchen and finding my mom on the phone. As I listened to the one side of the conversation, a heavy and horrible certainty slowly grew in my belly. Before she hung up, there were tears in her eyes. I asked her, “Is Grandpa Ray dead?” She said yes, and I climbed into her lap and cried. The curtains across the glass door were shut up behind us. I could only think how I would never see his face again, running out smiling to see his grandchildren. He would alwa

     The Wadi Rum: a valley in the country of Jordan that has nothing to do with an alcoholic drink. This remote and barren waste, a truly Middle Eastern sandscape studded with great promontories of rock, stretching like fingers of the hand of a buried giant reaching for sky, for air. We camp in the shadow of one of these towers on a mild and cloudless night: the temperature and breeze are paradise-perfect for sleeping with no blanket or roof except for the canopy of stars overhead—stars that defy all pictures, on film or in the mind. A well in the sky, wide as the earth, deep as goes beyond all thought and light.     Mounting

     Paul gazed aimlessly over the sprawling, hurrying cityscape from his seventh-floor balcony. Too much and too many, he thought. Too many cars, too many people, too many buildings, too much noise, too much smoke and haze and jade. He would never have come here by choice, but his company didn't give him much of one. His wife had had a choice however, to go with him or stay. She chose to stay, permanently, preferring the quiet country life and their kids to him and the concrete jungle. There were too many people all packed together, with no room for her wide open spaces. The move wasn't all there was to it, but it was the pebble that

     I'm faster than a bullet train, more powerful than a nuclear generator, able to fly around the earth in the time it takes you to check your watch...sounds great, right? Stuff people everywhere, everyday dream, wish they could do. And it is pretty fun, for a little while, but then every idiot in the world expects me to save them from whatever trouble they're in, just because I have the power to. You know what—maybe I don't want to save them. I just want to be left to do my own thing. They say that with great power comes great responsibility, but forget that—I'm responsible to no one but myself. I would love to just be a

     According to her, I’m a mean, pathetic liar. I can’t believe the nerve of her—after everything we’ve been through—after everything she’s done to me! I always did my best, I did everything for her, but it was never good enough! I gave her everything she could have wanted—took her out to nice restaurants, bought her expensive jewelry and clothes... Even then, she just couldn’t let me have my space! I never asked to be in on every tiny intimate detail of her life, so why couldn’t she have had the same respect for my privacy? She should have expected some hostility from me when she

     I had an opportunity to create something compelling, heart-wrenching, soul-stirring, and all those other clichéd terms of praise that critics love to use in their weekly columns.I could have made people cry. Do you understand that? With black glyphs on white paper, an alien string of symbols of arbitrary shape and size, which only have meaning because society at large has agreed what they shall mean, I could have made someone’s heart ache with such longing that it could not be contained behind their face. “Glory be!” says the Cabby. “I’d have been a better man all my life if I’d known ther

     I learned that y'all shouldn't go messing around with the Sheriff of Archer County, Texas. I surely learned it well out on a long, lonely stretch of highway on the prairie. If you've ever driven through Texas, or heard about someone who has, I can tell you it's everything you imagine: hot, dusty, and flat as a jackrabbit what just got real friendly with an eighteen-wheeler.     The Sheriff of Archer County has held his post for over three decades. He took it over from his father, who took it over from his father as well. Suffice to say this is a line of men who take their job seriously. All the young men of Archer County learned

     I don’t know why I remember having a mental image of my family’s black Isuzu Trooper rolling down a road in the Sandia Mountains. That car is long gone; I haven’t been to those mountains in over twelve years; but on one of my family’s day trips in that car, coming back down from those hills, I had a sudden, vivid image of our vehicle as it would appear to someone on the road behind us.     Everything was as crisp as a well-developed black-and-white photograph: the shining fiberglass, the old gray road, the interminable trees flanking us like an honor guard, liveried in the standard of their homeland. Why d