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The other day, while waiting an hour or so down the road for a friend to arrive for a long-planned lunch date, I stole a few minutes with the February 25 issue of The New Yorker, which I had slipped into my oversized bag.

The magazine fell to page 77, Joan Acocella's story on Adam Phillips, called "This is Your Life." This first paragraph needs no Kephart intercessions. Just read it, and see if, on this day at least, it might save you. The photo above, by the way, is of Jeb Stuart Wood, whom I profiled in the Inquirer on Sunday. He's a foundry man at work here on a piece for the great sculptress Michele Oka Doner. Behind him are the old mobiles he restores when he finds time. Elsewhere are his own sculptures, suspended and waiting. I thought of Jeb often after my interview that day—of how broadly and peaceably he was living.

From The New Yorker:

Adam Phillips, Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer, dislikes the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential, and this is the subject of his new book, "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of the night, we do think this, and grieve that it isn't possible. "And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives," Phillips writes. "Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live."

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Yesterday I told the story of my first meeting with the internationally acclaimed artist Michele Oka Doner, and how that conversation became a friendship became a Philadelphia Inquirer story that celebrates artists in collaboration, the foundry master Jeb Stuart Wood, and the resurgent Port Richmond neighborhood.

Today I share the link.

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Weekends in the Inquirer are like Christmases of long ago—I wake even earlier than usual, and eager. My eagerness now is for the early edition of the Sunday news, where I've written of Chanticleer garden and the Jersey Shore, of ballroom dancing and Philadelphia light, of the Schuylkill River and the cemetery where I often go before I teach my class at Penn. This weekend my story features the internationally acclaimed artist Michele Oka Doner and a spectacular Port Richmond foundry owned by the artist Jeb Stuart Wood. It's a story about collaboration, trust, and a converted warehouse in former collier country.

I met Michele during National YoungArts week in Miami. I mentioned how much I liked the pin she was wearing. She said she'd made it, slipped me her card, mentioned the loft where she lives in New York City. When I told her that I hailed from Philadelphia she replied that she has much of her work cast there in a foundry she trusts—the sort of work that ends up in the Louvre and MOMA, the Hayden Planetarium and the Miami Airport, a Tiffany's in New York City or a store clear across the world, a private home. "Come visit us at work," she said, and a few weeks later I showed up at the door of Independent Casting.

From Jeb I learned about the resurgence of a part of Philadelphia I'd never traveled through. I learned about the art of casting, about what it takes to run a foundry and to work with some of the world's leading sculptors. From Michele I learned about art as conversation, about the bronzing of organic stuff, about rivers, history, mythology. I was out of my element, and I loved it.

Tomorrow I'll share the link to the whole story, which features a photograph of Michele at work in the foundry. Today I share the photos above and this first scanned page of story.

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