For my neighbor Linda in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was chickens – refrigerator magnets, figurines, calendars, coffee mugs, decorative plates. Sitting in her kitchen on a sunny morning meant being surrounded by feathers and beaks in all sorts of patterns. She just loved them. She couldn’t say why. For someone else, it might be bumper stickers. You stick one on, then another, and soon the whole back of the car is covered in slogans and jokes, the oldest of which are beginning to fade and peel.
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I’ve never been a compulsive collector of objects – I don’t like clutter. I collect the ends of essays I want to write.
The ones I like give me something to write towards, a sense of purpose. Pretty much anything goes, but I’m especially drawn to twists of fate, revelations, irony, rhyming plots, and concrete images that are symbolically encoded.
A few years ago, at dusk, I saw an owl swoop down on a low branch and stick its beak into a mockingbird’s nest. The mockingbirds inside made a terrible hissing, screeching, and gurgling noise—like a baby being scalded—and after a moment, for whatever reason, the owl decided it was too much and flew away. After the danger had passed, it became dark. The night grew darker. I realized that the owl could come back at any moment, and that the mockingbirds whose cheerful songs I so loved and had listened to all afternoon lived under constant threat. Although I did not know what story from my life this moment might make a good ending to, I knew it was an ending because it grew in significance in the silence of its denouement. It was factual and also metaphorical. I was those screeching mockingbirds. I was that owl.
In my twenties, when I was still reeling from a bad breakup, I once thought I saw my ex in a bookstore, but it was clearly someone else. I walked to my car and drove off. Eventually I drove past the landmarks of our relationship, streets we’d walked down, cafes where we’d chatted for hours over coffee. I drove past the house she’d grown up in, out in the country, just to see if it looked like I remembered it. It was a summer day. Sheep were grazing in a pasture. The wind blew through wild carrots. Inside the house, her mother, wearing a sun hat and gloves, was kneeling in the garden, tending the flowers. She looked up as I drove past.
Maybe she saw me, maybe she didn’t.
I put my foot on the gas and drove on, following the dusty country roads until the radio crackled and nothing seemed familiar. I stopped at the edge of a cornfield and sat for a minute with the windows rolled down, the field radiating its summery green warmth. Then, from the crackling static of the radio – at the very bottom of the scale – came a burst of live music. It took me a second to understand: It was some kind of talent show being broadcast from a nearby fair. A young girl was singing “The Rose” by Bette Midler in a trembling voice.
However, I am not collecting endings to have the last word about my life. In fact, I am writing against certainty.
The collision of my heartbreak with the billowing corn, hay dust, and horse-manure-scented sweetness of a fair broke something inside me. Life was sadder and more beautiful than I had ever imagined. And even though I had just begun my career as a writer at the time, I remember thinking: This is an end.
Imagining the moment in this way made it right. Pain wasn’t just something I was experiencing – it was something I could use.
In practical terms, I might as well have thought: This is a startOr simply: Remember this feeling. But endings have more appeal for me. A beginning is a leap, a plunge, and I know that for some people nothing is more exciting than setting off into the unknown. I prefer to pause and look back. I am less interested in setting off than in arriving. My journeys are journeys back into memory in search of origins and meaning. Where and when did this story begin? How did I end up here feeling this way? And why? Whether sudden or drawn out, endings bring with them a paradoxical quality of awareness, a feeling as if nothing will ever be the same as before, and also as if the world had always been this way only I had forgotten. Every ending is, in its own way, a homecoming.
I have more possible endings stored than I can ever use. Like my neighbor Linda with her chickens, I just love them. And like those chickens – if I’m honest – my collection is more decorative than functional. Over the years, I have used very few of my hoarded memories in what I have written. Even when I set out to end at a very specific point, the act of writing inevitably takes me somewhere else.
What I often think of as an ending is actually the continuation of another dynamic, a wave from a larger splash. Sometimes different endings rub against each other like cricket wings, a dissonant harmony.
As children, my brother and I used to throw crickets into the pond on our father’s farm. We found them by turning over rocks and rotten logs. The crickets’ hollow bodies floated, and although they had never swum, they knew how to kick their legs and walk on land. The kicking inevitably attracted sunfish, dark ovals that floated in the water below. Sensing their presence, the crickets panicked and kicked harder. One sunfish rose and snapped to the surface, followed by another and another. Piece by piece, they tore the crickets to pieces, devouring the carcasses in the depths.
One day, as we were throwing crickets into the pond, our friend Danny came by with a fishing rod over his shoulder. He was on his way to the creek in the woods. A man named Rick was with him. Rick was in his thirties, worked the third shift at Alcoa, and drove a white Trans-Am. He lived across the street from the elementary school and played basketball on the playground every afternoon and evening.
On hot days we would go to his house to drink from the garden hose in his yard. Little did we know – or at least I didn’t know – that he was targeting young boys, often those without fathers, befriending them, taking them on night fishing trips, and sexually abusing them. That day when he and Danny passed by on the way to the creek, to me he was just Rick, and Danny – whose home life was hard – was Danny. I turned over an old log, grabbed a cricket, and threw it in the water. We all stood watching for a moment, and I remember Rick smiling. I remember how happy it made me to make him smile.
What does all this mean? The only way I know to approach such a question is to ask: What has it meant so far?
For years, I thought this moment would be the end. I wanted to write about my hometown, and about Danny, who tried to run my brother and me off the road one night in high school after a fight on the way home from a football game. I wanted to write about vulnerability, violence, and guilt. I wanted to delve into the hunger of a sunfish.
It never worked.
Then, one fall, decades later, as I was walking to my car after work, I heard a cricket chirping on the shoulder of the parking lot. It was late October, and the crickets wouldn’t be chirping much longer. I stopped to listen, and was enthralled by the sound.
The cricket would never know what it meant to me, how it held parts of my childhood, whole summers, in its stiff wings. Danny and Rick and that day at the pond were there. All the good things I remembered, too. Nights fishing with my father while fireflies sparkled over the water. The tender warmth of a first kiss in a neighbor’s yard. The cricket’s song was the sound of life, an otherness, sweet and rough and indifferent. And even though life could be cruel and terrible – and permanent – I loved it anyway.
I’m turning 50 in a few months, an age that’s teeming with endings. I have a teenage son who will soon be driving. My father is elderly and has been in and out of the hospital battling colon cancer. I have a wife, a dog, a mortgage, credit card debt, a car payment, and a writing-teaching job that’s becoming increasingly complicated by the ubiquity of AI. What does all this mean? The only way I know to approach a question like this is to ask: What has it meant so far? Writing an ending means grappling with this question and consciously choosing the contours and nuances of an answer.
But I don’t collect endings to have the last word on my life. In fact, I write against certainty. The more options I have for ending an essay, the freer I am to change my mind about its meaning. And I don’t just use my pain, as I thought at the beginning. I write to savor my pain, to transcend it, to transform it.
Like many long-time collectors, my obsession with ends has shifted over the years from the thing itself—the thrill of discovery and possession—to the more mundane joys of searching. More and more, I see myself as a kind of mineral collector, roaming the beach after the tide has washed it away. I’m not looking for anything in particular, a shape I like, a color, a certain sparkle and shimmer. I can’t take home all the ends I’d like, even all the ones I find unusually beautiful. But I pick them up anyway. I sweep away the sand and run a finger along their edges. Their weight is a comfort to me, even when they fall from my hand.
