An electrician, a very friendly Southern gentleman with a twang as thick as Stone Mountain, is poking around the wiring on our deck right now, trying to ascertain why a couple outlets there don’t work and why the fan runs, at top speed, about as fast as I do. Down in our basement, a basement… Read More The Joy$ of Owning a Home
When the topic of my high school athletic career is raised, certainly never by anyone but me, I don’t gin up some story of teen glory. I don’t pretend I was a scrappy point guard on the basketball team, or a good-glove no-hit cog on the baseball team, or (as if anyone would believe it)… Read More Fathers, Sons & Brothers
The whole idea of needles, when you stop to think about it (which I’m already realizing is probably not something you want to do), is pretty medieval. Throw in the slightly kooky concept of vaccines — which are often, but not always, an actual smidgen of the very sickness that you’re trying to avoid —… Read More Coming Out
Twenty-five years, just about any way you look at it, is a lot of years. It’s a honking huge number of years. A human being, any human being, will stumble from creation all the way into young adulthood in 25 years. A teenager who sticks around 25 more years hobbles fully into middle age. A… Read More The Big Two Five
The relentless question, even after the arguing and debating and philosophizing is all played out, lingers: Would you rather live your life willfully and happily discounting the anvils constantly dropping from the sky, or spend your days nervously looking for cover in the hopes of sidestepping a few of them as they inevitably fall? I… Read More Optimism is Hard
We’re in the final hour, if I’ve timed this right, of the most memorable, awful, scary, weird, frustrating, infuriating year of our lives. Midnight absolutely can’t get here soon enough. Springsteen warns about that kind of thinking, about rooting on tomorrow to come while missing out on today: My soul checked out missing as I… Read More Looking To Twenty-One
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