A 20-year detour is long enough. — PITTSBURGH, Pa., 9/11/21 It is 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2021, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am driving my 18-year-old son down from our home in the northern suburbs to the University of Pittsburgh campus, to a dorm not far from the elementary school that we both attended. …

Our apartment sits at the mouth of one of the world’s busiest tunnels, and some of the world’s most impatient drivers creep by every day. Here’s how we leveraged the unrelenting noise. — During the second year of the pandemic, my wife, a New York City native who always wanted to replant her feet there, had an idea: Let’s rent a small apartment there in addition to our home in Pittsburgh. …

The house was haunted. So was he. — “He’s dead,” Elise said. “I get it now. He’s the one who’s dead.” She was barely 12 at the time. We had rented “The Sixth Sense” from the Blockbuster down on Claremont, back when “Blockbuster” wasn’t yet an archaic word that summoned a pre-digital era of finding your entertainment at…

You know that friend who can whip up a perfect cocktail and make it look absurdly easy? Mine just wrote a book about it. And it’s not as difficult as you might think. — Shake Strain Done: Craft Cocktails at Home. By J.M. Hirsch. Illustrations by Lika Kvirikashvili. Voracious (Little, Brown & Co.), $25. One evening in the fall of 2004, my friend Jason and I went for dinner at Gallagher’s, a time-tested, high-end steak house in midtown Manhattan.

When the stuff is cleared out, what happens to the stories? — ASPINWALL, PA 8/8/20 2:03 PM Sometimes you do violence to things, and even people and memories, by simply moving stuff or getting rid of it. I stand here inside Fox Chapel Guardian Storage unit № 12104. This truck-sized storage space just east of Pittsburgh where we brought many of the contents of my parents’ house…

A poem of conspicuous quarantine consumption. — Sometimes I wonder what’s behind my wife’s eyes when, like this morning, we stand on our doorstep over a freshly delivered box and discuss the second case of urinary-tract-friendly canned cat food to arrive in as many days and she studiously avoids commenting on the four oversized jars of fake bacon bits that arrived in the carton…

A virus poem. — And the world paused for a spring it had never seen still full of us yet gray and overflowing with the endless negative space where we all used to be. For a moment a moment still ongoing we saw life as it would be if we did not occupy it. …

With apologies to Dorothy Parker. — “Agnes DeKay,” my son said in my ear, “isn’t really a name that I’d want to have here.” He spoke as we walked in a hallway one day through the “castle of geezers,” my father would say. My parents had moved there when not doing well and became sharp observers…