The Entertainer
On Nov. 20, 2007, Dad and I ate breakfast in the kitchen. Mom couldn’t get out of bed, so he suggested I bring her some toast. When I entered the master bedroom, she was awake but still in bed. My...
View ArticleThe Lock-In
“Venus was out roller skating.” Mars had expectations, but Venus dashed those to pieces. She washed her long blonde hair with strawberry crème rinse, wriggled into her tightest Jordache jeans, smacked...
View ArticleThe Handkerchief
Talk about forgotten gifts. On my 21st birthday, Mom and Dad gave me a bottle of rosé wine (I could “officially” drink at 19, but the folks wanted to mark that occasion by buying me wine) and … a...
View ArticleA Mirror Ball, an Echoplex and One Jobless Teen
“Well, my mom and pop told me, ‘Son you gotta make some money, if you wanna use the car to go ridin’ next Sunday.’” Having a car was everything. So when Dad took away my car keys on July 4—of all the...
View ArticleSki Day
“I cried about Christmas a while ago…” So begins the diary entry for Dec. 22, 1977, written in cramped, tiny handwriting with a blue-black fountain pen. It was two days before the school holiday break,...
View ArticlePeeling Onions
“Boys! Home for dinner!” The alpha male with the booming voice was tasked with ringing the front door dinner bell and bellowing that call to the entire Casco Point neighborhood. That daily ritual...
View ArticleTouched
“When your parents die, you will never see them again. You might think you understand that, but until it happens, you don’t. They say that you come into the world alone and that you leave alone too....
View ArticleFork in the Road
All families, it seems, have their secrets. And while that may or may not be true, there’s one secret that this member of the Family Project will need to reveal to the other remaining member in the...
View ArticleThey’ve Only Just Begun
“I was perfectly content before I was born,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “and I think of death as the same state.” Therefore, this is a tale told by a zygote. Perhaps a discontented zygote, even,...
View ArticleThey’ve Only Just Begun (Addendum)
I’m not particularly superstitious, so I’ll just throw this out to y’all. You decide what to make of it, especially coming off a blog post from about a month ago. This morning I sorted and recycled...
View ArticleFixing a Hole
“NO STEAM SHOVELS WANTED” It still hits me in the gut, decades later. And—like Mike Mulligan and his cherished Mary Anne—it, too, made me VERY SAD. No children’s story affected me more than Mike...
View ArticleLeaving the Lake
“The past is a story I tell to forget about the present.” Yeah, yeah, I know. I wrote that the past is nothing I’m particularly fond of. That the beating heart of this blog lies in the questions that...
View ArticleHanging by a Hair
Interviewer: “So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?” Frank Zappa: “You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?” A weird side effect to writing this blog—sensory nostalgia....
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