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Austin was born. Corina dropped out of school.

A year later, Taylor was born. They borrowed $500 from us to pay the deposit, and moved into a duplex. Rafael somehow managed to get a loan for a car. They found seasonal jobs, went back to unemployment, signed up for classes, dropped out of classes. They spent their days with the babies, in the directionless leisure of poverty.

Ups, and downs. Rafael got a job, a real job, stocking the soup shelves in a big-box grocery discount store. They moved again, into a house. Corina worked part-time at a deli; they took different shifts, shared childcare, stayed sober, kept the house clean. Then Kaylee was born, and they moved again.

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We'd been moving from one monastery or temple to the next almost every day, bearing gifts, paying respects, attending ceremonies. We rose at 3:30 or 4 every morning, joining in temple schedules until after breakfast, and then moved on, by foot, taxi, bus and train, sometimes all in a day. Mostly, we took trains; when I wasn't in a zendo in Japan, I seemed to be in a station. And after a few weeks in the world of Japanese trains, I felt as though movement itself was my home.

That day in Kanazawa, a busy city in Ishikawa Prefecture, we were overcome by giddy exhaustion. We had a long wait at the Kanazawa station -- when we weren't moving, we were usually waiting. We piled onto a bench in a heap, a dozen scruffy, coarse Americans out of place in the decorous quiet of Japanese business travelers, and somehow Mikio ended up in the middle. Mikio was raised in Tokyo and Osaka, but is married to an American woman and lives in the United States now.

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Modesty Blaise by Peter O'Donnell
I collect Modesty. She is the queen of kick-ass girls, born in a comic strip and finally killed last year after appearing in three decades' worth of stories. The Blaise series is one of the most reliably predictable suspense series I've ever found: the same harrowing biography of a nomadic orphan of uncertain heritage who becomes a teenage crime-syndicate leader, the same inevitable plunge into danger with her best friend Willie Garvin, the same fight against terrible odds to rid the world of a nasty person -- invariably a psychotic genius planning a terrible crime against innocents. She kills more, fights more, survives more and has sex more often than James Bond. Dig her.

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Meat-eating is itself a solution to overpopulation, even as overpopulation largely eliminates the eating of meat. A lot of meat in the diet means a lot of animals on the land eating a lot of subsistence grains, and this equation leads directly to the starvation of agrarian people. The historian Fernand Braudel hypothesized that the success of Asian cultures was due in part to their largely vegetarian diet, which allowed populations to grow large and spread across an efficiently managed expanse of land. That these populations were largely vegetarian only because they didn't have the grain base to support a meat diet is the other side of this suggestion.

In all this long history of meat-eating, there is a parallel history of solemn concern. People have been almost as occupied with what it meant to eat meat as with getting the meat in the first place. Eating meat is, traditionally, a matter of ceremony, sacrifice and ritual gratitude. Eating a lot of meat, as Europeans and Americans like to do, has always been seen as a dangerous act, an act fraught with the possibility of psychic and spiritual ruin.

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Dark fable, I write, and there I am, in a world of hidden and exposed fears: "In the NBA black men rule (sort of), so we admire them (sort of); everywhere else in America we're afraid of them." "Black Planet" is not exactly about basketball -- though if you don't like basketball, you may find the book tough going; the details of the game fill every page. The book's theme is something else -- "white people's reverence for, resentment toward, and colonization of black people's bodies."

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Here's one grumble: I've never liked the name of this site. It's one of those back-handed compliments like, "She's a great woman writer." In private, I call it Mothers Who Think Because Somebody Has To and Mothers Who Think Because Nobody Else Does and Mothers Who (Duh!) Think. I am, like many women, a mother who thinks, about motherhood and a lot of other things, and nobody needs to tell me that. There's nothing quite like being the continual source of safety, education and civility to a helpless human being to make you think -- twice. Nothing like being that all the time, no matter what else you are and no matter what else you do, being that even (and especially) when you don't want to be it. As they say about the guillotine, it concentrates the mind beautifully.

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I graduated from eighth grade in 1971, on a warm, clear day, in a white cotton dress with blue flowers on it that I'd sewed myself,
rather badly. The sun shone through and outlined my legs. We stood on rickety bleachers in a hot gymnasium, and sang the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." ("White lace and proooommmisses, a kiss for luck and we're oooonnnnn our wwwaaayyy ...") Did I walk across the stage? I don't know; by then, I was already looking beyond, to high school.

I didn't graduate from high school. I quit after two years, leaving both it and home, no one very sorry to see me go. I went to college instead, an outwardly sour, inwardly yearning 16-year-old, with no idea what was in store but racing ahead as fast as I could.

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Teenage boys come to my door, knock, politely call me "Ma'am." They try to sell me magazine subscriptions so they can win valuable prizes and college scholarships, shucking and looking at their feet. They want work, lawn-mowing and weed-pulling. They want friends -- not me. I visit my own friends and talk to their teenage sons, who must be courteous to me, and I grill them about new movies and changing mores and how they feel about the president's personal life. Young men unfold their long limbs and climb out of their roughly idling old cars patched with rust and lift the seat forward
so my just-grown sons can say their hearty hail-fellows and leap up the steps, two at a time.

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This is my dirty little secret: I hate soccer.

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I was applauding Kaul all along, until he added that what's really needed is "a compromise that balanced the needs and desires of gun enthusiasts with the need of society to protect itself ..." And there we part ways.

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Along the same cobblestone streets, leaning on walls of crumbling, decaying stucco, framed against faded granite, turning a corner of soot-black bricks: girls holding hands, boys holding hands. Women arm in arm, men arm in arm. Sisters and brothers, cousins and friends, mothers and daughters, fathers and toddlers: holding hands, arms around each other's shoulders, each other's waists. Kissing cheeks. Hugging. Holding hands, stroking arms, brushing cheeks, touching shoulders. In cheerful recognition, in quiet affection, in tenderness, in ritual. Cousins wrapped together in conversation, brothers in silent comfort, sisters in whispered relief.

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Once I thought Fiona would be a part of my everyday life. I knew
her as an
idea, as a hope, a wish, before she was conceived, because her mother, Karen,
was my best friend. Karen and I had one of those romantically entangled
friendships women sometimes have, the kind where you talk on the telephone
almost every day, tell each other the daily details -- the broken washing
machine, the fight with the husband, the struggles with work. We didn't say
hello, because we knew each other's voices so well; the phone would ring and
I'd pick it up and she would start talking, as though we'd only been
interrupted for a few seconds.

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As a strong advocate of both free speech and reproductive choice, I found this case equally difficult to embrace or reject. The jury considered as evidence only a few specific instances of speech:

A poster listing the "Dirty Dozen," doctors listed as "guilty" of "crimes against humanity" for performing abortions, along with their photographs, names and personal information. A "Wanted" poster with the name, address and photograph of a doctor who provides abortions. And a Web site called the Nuremberg Files.

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In a supposedly growing wave of success, conservative Christian groups
calling themselves Exodus and Transformation and Courage use prayer and
therapy to help unhappy gay men and lesbians "return" to heterosexuality.
John and Anne Paulk are the poster children of this movement, posing stiffly
in front of two incongruous plates of fried eggs and bacon in media all over
the country. Gays supposedly can convert to heterosexuality because
homosexuality is nothing more than a misapprehension of emotional needs caused
by one's parents and Satan, in that order. (Conveniently set aside is the
concurrent belief that gays can also convert heterosexuals to homosexuality --
the well-known phenomenon of "recruiting" -- which would seem to indicate that
heterosexuality is also a rather malleable condition. When Anne Heche,
after years of sexual relationships with men, fell in love with Ellen De Generes,
everyone from Newsweek to CNN decided she had "become" a lesbian.)

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I'm alone, out of town on business, and I have two hours free -- two hours to pretend I'm alone in the world, with no place to go and no one to please. I go out to the pool with a soda and a book and find an empty lounge, its vinyl strips still sagging in the shape of a departed bottom.

Three chubby girls with identical black hair and ill-fitting swimsuits are playing Double Dare in the shallow end.

"Dare, or Double Dare?" the biggest girl says to the smallest.

The smaller girl flips her heavy, wet hair. "Double dare," she says, without hesitation.

"I dare you to stand on your head under water."

"Eeeaaasssy," drawls the girl, jumping in and flipping over.

A heavy, self-conscious woman bobs in the deep end, watching the dark-haired girls.

Nearby, a pair of prepubescent sisters compete for the attention of an older boy. Their swimsuits bag on their attenuated bodies as they shriek and call; the boy, his bony chest puffed out like a mating frog's, takes turns flinging them away from him so they can splash and scream.

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I run into the poet at a party a few weeks after his session ended, and he is sly and self-satisfied. "They're going to eat you up," he says, with enthusiasm. "You've gotta get right in their faces," he adds, getting right in my face, "and show them what's what."

So I call the novelist who preceded me, a mild man with a grown daughter and years of classroom experience. "It's the hardest teaching I've ever done," he tells me. "And I'll never do it again."

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