A formerly close friend passes on the street without looking up, and a college friend arrives at a dorm room and refuses to leave. A working-class schoolboy looks for friends in his new neighborhood, and a middle-class teen learns something else during his piano lesson. A couple on the rocks take a vacation in a sunny clime, and another couple, older and wiser, head out for a weekend in New England. A medical student gets close to a girl with cystic fibrosis, and a family doctor loses his equilibrium when he treats an attractive but abused young woman.

Such are the stories Michael Glenn recounts in this volume, selected from the many he wrote between from 1958 and 2015, beginning in college and continuing through medical school and his career as a physician and psychiatrist, factory worker and community activist. His characters are prickly and difficult, caring and kind, old and young. They struggle to find meaning in the debris found on a street, a dangerous encounter on a subway train, and an idealized relationship that spans decades.

With grit and honesty, realistic descriptions, and a nuanced awareness of emotional states, Glenn writes scenes that bear witness to the changing world of the past half-century. The characters learn from their lived experiences, and the readers are the beneficiaries.