Things do not look well for the tragic giant. We all contain a multitude of identities, some elective, some necessary. "Individuals are never born into nothing, and what they are born into is never all that they are," says Leon Wieseltier, but the particular condition of Jewish identity in the 20th century, of Israeli identity, presents a singular tension. The gap between the necessary illiberalism of our existence and the chosen liberalism of our practice often feels unbridgeable. And yet who in recent years more than Sharon has defined the possibility? He should be much in all of our thoughts today.

In the months before my father died, the voiceless rustling that issued out in the leaves of my mother's letters discarded around my house, in wastebaskets and under carpets, in the kitchen, and hidden in corners where I had paused to drink, hit a pitch the like of which I had not heard before. She sounded like a lost gull, and the unabated continuance of her sorrow was a frightful novelty in my knowledge of her, so generally inelegant and only momentarily concerned: immigration, the kitchen, property taxes, my job, my divorce.

But between my mother's inability to care for my father (diapers being a thing that a wife and mother should only deal with for one span of her life) and the rapid spiral of dissolution and division that was the divorce (what belonged to whom, which CDs, cooking utensils, books, friends to be parceled up or auctioned off), I had little tying me to the Cape. Molly and I were speaking in the half-angry staccato of undesired endings, and my new apartment in the City was newly cold-bedded—Tara having fled west once the realities of the technical end of our adultery had revealed themselves—and at any rate overrun with unshelved books. My father's turn for the worse was a perfect opportunity, then, to take a leave of absence from pretending to teach freshman how to write, and leave an increasing number of half-finished projects behind. I was, after all, leaving nothing behind me that I could have, or perhaps was just rectifying the first in a series of half-hearted leavetakings.

Flying home that winter, I sat on the edge of the plane, next to a four year old named Max and his mother—who seemed too young to my eyes to be even married, and yet Max's brother sat with his father across the way. Two, and she seemed no different than many of my students, the same fresh babble about terror and travel and family. In the still negotiations of divorce it was hard to think that we had been this young once, had seemed to lone strangers flying homewards a singular piece of small comfort, a puzzling domesticity, that we had made others jealous between thin aluminum walls hurtling through space, shushing children, changing diapers, nestling asleep. That our small shared resentments might seem attractive, desperately soft. That others would notice the brief crisp contact of our fingers as we shuttled between children, that they would longingly observe the unheard passing from lips to ear, admire the waiting reverence we had for their small forms.

Johnny Cash in the liner notes for his album Love explains the album cover, a photo where June Carter Cash is settling her head on his shoulder, half asleep, his face turned benevolently into her restless honey-hued hair. Thinking of being in the kitchen reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem about the death of her husband while June sets behind me, he said. Max and his younger brother had fallen asleep, their small chests rising and falling steadily under the roar of the plane, and their parents look as if they might make it to kitchens and long settling, to some undesired but expected end.

This was how I came again to San Diego, came to listen in that half-listening way to all the scattered noise that washed like water over what had become of my family: to sit in the quiet hours of the evening and not hear my father’s sighs or mother’s shuffling silent weeping or the hidden echoes of my brothers reverberating in now still rooms, or the waves lap, or the crescendo of wind and fluttering palm as anything more than white noise crashing meaninglessly over me, breaking, and then spilling back out to sea. It left me in my room in the evening, and soundless, padding through the light of day with washcloths and obligation—the quiet indignities of a father's nakedness—a continuous blur of moving orifices at which I nodded and fed and wiped and from which I retired. And then it was over. On the night of the twenty-third of January, the husk that was my father spilled out, the last breath he hadn’t taken catching in his throat, like shit.

While I know that I'm behind in posts promised and ventured (Schindler, Christianity, Aesthetic Liberalism), I also have decided to try something that I've thought the blog format could bring back: the deadline pressure of serial fiction. Those of the readership who are interested will be able to grab the entire story by selecting the relevant category / story title. And I'll try to post a little every few days. First up: "Of Love and Zebras."