I like to ask long-term couples where and how they met—always a good remedy to a boring conversation. My best friend met his wife through friends. After the second date, they knew they were going to get married.
I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a quiet settlement eight miles from Copley Square. The Marathon’s route follows Commonwealth Avenue through Newton into Boston. My house is a block from the Marathon’s 20-mile marker, in the middle of Heartbreak Hill, the most notorious of a series of four steep ascents that runners must endure as they pass through the city.
At the awkward gathering of New York area students who had been accepted to Princeton, the father of another black student approached me as I poured myself a glass of ginger ale. “You know, we have to stick together,” he … Read More
It stung to realize that I was less than what my family thought, and I began to feel an unbridgeable distance between us. I blamed myself, but I also blamed the God who my family had always promised would help me. I tried my best. Why am I failing?
“Genealogy is an engaging project to undergo because it navigates the…paradoxical relationship between a narrowly defined conception of the self and the larger, more communal one”