One of the pleasures of being on leave is time to read. I’ve been reading for a few hours each day. Most recently, I finished Through the Children’s Gate, an autobiographical series of essays about raising children in New York City. Though in someways completely unrelatable to my life (the kids go to Dalton, the family lives on the Upper East Side), there is a poignancy and nostalgia for both New York and for childhood that I found moving. A lot of the essays were previously published in the New Yorker, including this one about a three-year-old’s imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli.