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I’m obsessed with luck. Always have been.

I have a lucky number. Twenty. I own it so completely that if I ever hear you counting and you don’t say, “eighteen...nineteen...twenty-one...twenty-two…” you can be sure a cease and desist order is on the way.

I once owned a lucky pair of shorts that I wore under baseball uniforms and hockey gear, and I never washed a single win out of them. They were the exact kind of shorts my mom spent half my childhood warning me not to be caught in at the doctor’...

All he did was up and move.

The idiot.

Couldn’t tell you where he went. Rented one of those twenty-buck-a-day U-Hauls, packed up his pitiful possessions and left.

The sun was a medallion on the horizon when the truck shrunk over the hills. It was my prize. A sign I’d paid my price. That I’d have my reward. And, believe me, I deserved it. Even a brief encounter with him was lethal cocktail. Two parts annoyance, one part humiliation—like having your eyes pecked out by a gaggle of street corner...

These are the times that make men. The times that summon the gnashing of teeth and the biting of tongues and the clenching of fists. The times that simmer in stomachs and decimate antacid supplies on a global scale.

This is the bottom of the ninth. With the bases loaded, one out, and the pitcher’s spot due up. There’s nothing but goose eggs on the scoreboard. Not a single ass touches a single seat in any single section of the stadium.

These are the times, my friends. The times that separate...

My first day and I’m wearing the black wing tips—Alfanis. Been in the box since Brooks Financial, but I polished them up last night so they shined like eight balls. Had Ellen run an iron over my gray tweed. She hung it next to the bed before we slept.

I wake up early. Beat the alarm by two hours. Can’t go back to sleep so I watch the sun rise over the park and gnaw on a day-old bagel from the Carnegie.

Around seven, I toss a bottle of Evian in my briefcase and dodge the morning dog-walkers on...

There’s a single moment for a raindrop, when it breaks free from the granite sky and pelts the glass beside my bed in one fat slop. It hangs there as a perfect, crystalline globe. And it twinkles. A sort of playful wink before it takes the final descent. An abrupt, rolling slither that leaves a trail of liquefied dignity—its legacy. Then it soaks into the sill, its watermark having been noticed. Acknowledged.

Such dignity doesn’t afford itself to just any raindrop. It doesn’t show itself in...