I Wonder ...

At an early age, my brother Harry gave me some advice that would shape my life.

"That doesn't sound like you," he said. "You should write the way you talk."

I was maybe 10 years old and he was reading my homework. God knows why. I thought he was crazy.

More than a year before he died he said to himself, "I wonder if I have cancer." But he didn't do anything about it.

I'm remembering these two incident — unrelated, really, except that my brother shows up in both — because I'm trying to figure out why we listen to some people and not others. To others and not ourselves.

In my case, I didn't really believe my brother because, well, he was my brother. What did he know about writing? Anyway, I didn't really care because, at the time, I wasn't planning to become a writer.

In my brother's case, maybe he didn't trust what his body was telling him or maybe he was afraid of the truth.

I wish I could tell him he was right in my case.

I wish I could tell him he was wrong about the cancer.

Before I Was Born

Before I was born, my family was huddled in a basement praying that the bombs falling above them would not blow them to smithereens.

I don't know how many other families were in their basements praying or what happened to them, but my family survived.

This was in Germany during World War II. My father was in the German army. Suffice it to say it wasn't his idea, but he was German and there was this godawful war.

I came along years later, after the family moved to America, and my parents almost never talked about the war when I was growing up. Only if I asked them something and only enough to answer my question.

All wars are awful but this one was especially bad, and my family had been on the wrong side. I guess I didn't really want to talk about it either.

When I was growing up, America went to war again, this time in Vietnam, where our purpose was less clear, and when I was 18 I was among the last Americans to receive a draft card. What would I do? I waited to see if my number came up. It didn't, and so I didn't have to decide.

My older brother Harry did have to decide. He decided to lie, twice. He lied to the army so they would declare him morally unfit, and he lied to the family so we would think he had flunked the physical.

Many years later he told me the truth and it didn't matter. Either way, I was glad he didn't have to go.

Anyway, he decided and acted, and that took more courage than I seemed to have.

I'm told that one of the first things my nephew Mike learned to say was "Peace in the Middle East." He grew up in a hopeful time and the phrase was on the TV so often he just picked it up.

That was more than 30 years ago.

Lately things have been much worse, from Baghdad to Beirut, and it feels as if the bombs that were falling before I was born will never stop falling.

Such Small Hands

Where to start ...

Summer 2005. I'm sitting on a yoga mat in a tiny hole-in-the-wall training center — in a strip mall, between a camera store and a post office — and my heart is opening in a way I seldom let it.

In one sense I'm not doing anything I haven't done thousands of times over the past 29 years. I'm simply holding my wife's hand. In this case, however, she is lying on her back and I am rubbing her fingers, pressing each fingertip with my thumbnail — an acupressure technique we learned weeks earlier.

My heart opens as I feel how tiny her hand is in mine. It's like a child's, and I know she has the same innocent spirit she was born with. At the same time, I see the tiny spots on her skin that give away the secret that she, like me, is already 50 years old.

Then, in my head, I hear the words our instructor spoke when she first met my wife: "Such small hands, but they hold so many people."

Now I'm crying because I know just how true that is.

I see us growing old together, older and grayer than we are now. Already we have been together longer than we've been apart. I think about the moment when her spirit will slip away and it breaks my heart.

Yet in this moment I am more alive and more thankful than I have ever been.