I got back Monday evening, and to her credit, the wife showed up at the airport to retrieve me. This could be less a consequence of love than an indication of her pressing need for reinforcements, but I’ll take what I can get. Does the cavalry captain ever stop to ask why the besieged settlers …
Eli is sitting at his little table in the corner of our kitchen, eating Cheerios. This is never a pretty sight, especially when he’s a little snuffly. He sees me watching him, and with much effort he scoots away from the table and toddles over to me. “Kiss?” I survey, with no small amount of …
My train was towing a different type of passenger car today. After we boarded, the conductor pointed out a very important detail: “There’s a closet at the end of the first car, but it used to be a bathroom, and they haven’t taken the toilet out yet. I must ask you not to use this …
The problem with little boys and their favorite clothes is that boys grow, clothes shrink, and seasons change. Caleb’s favorite shirt is a thick yellow cotton one. If he were in charge of dressing and clothes washing in our house, he would wear it every day with his “comfy” pants, which used to live up …
Caleb in a rainy parking lot: “I want to walk through the pud muddle. Wait, I mean the rain muddle.” Last night Eli sang his ABC’s for me, but with a slight modification: “A B C D E F G; H I J K, M&M’s and me…”
On my train I heard a man talking to someone on the other end of his mobile phone. He was wallowing in an extreme state of obsequiousness. “And how are you this morning, sir? Ha ha ha! That’s great. Wonderful. No, I didn’t know that about you! Wonderful! Well, it really does sound fascinating. Absolutely …
I don’t think I have a theme today, which would not leave me in good stead with my 7th grade English teacher. Or maybe there is a theme lurking in here somewhere, and that theme is the combination of sweetness and stinkiness that is the little boy. I’m walking a fine line here — a …
Did I ever tell you about our house in Wichita? It was a beautiful, three-story, 1912 box colonial, with hardwood floors and the kind of molding that our nation has forgotten how to produce. The den had a fireplace of painted brick, a tin ceiling, and wood-paneled walls (1920-style, not 1970) with an etched and …
I haven’t written much about Caroline for the past year. I felt like I should just be done with this. So I put all my energy into other writing. But she is always there, lingering in the back of my mind. Sometimes she is an image, sometimes she is an invisible presence, but she is …
