On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing [...]

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How do people form their first enduring friendships, anyway — I mean, their very first friendships (like at age 5 or 6), and very enduring (like spanning decades)?
Maybe it’s different now, what with parents arranging “play dates” and similar activities. But when I was a kid, these things (looking back on them now) seemed to [...]

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From whiskey river:
The Moment
Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua — words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes [...]

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When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches.
But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, and [...]

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A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.
The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain [...]

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There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and [...]

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His time as a boy had passed many years ago. But, he suspected, he would always and forever be The Boy. His mind would ever run like two trains on two parallel tracks at once, one inside his head and the other outside, the trains always synced up, The Boy always and effortlessly stepping back [...]

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