Yesterday was Stephen Caleb’s birthday. He’s twelve, and there are now only 364 days between him and the onset of teenagerism, which I associate — at least among American kids — with sloth and self-indulgence, ignorance and idiocy and all-around brain malfunction, the latter now being scientifically proven at last. We are all of us …
I don’t know the first thing about how to be a father to a fifteen year-old girl. Today is her birthday and if she had lived I would be puzzling this out, what I think about clothes and boys and music and especially boys, because all my babies are beautiful and perhaps Caroline most of …
You would have been fourteen today. Amidst the chaos of cobbled-together derby cars and robot obstacle courses and four sweaty boys we might have made a cake just for you. I would have made you spaghetti, because it is your favorite. We could have walked across the bridge in the late afternoon, to sit on …
Caleb is now ten. He’s a “ten-ager,” as he likes to say. The boys come to work with me on their birthdays. I don’t know what they’ll do once I’m a world-famous author who writes full-time for a living. Perhaps sit in a corner in my little barn office and stare at the back of …
