Tony Woodlief | Author

boys

Crafted

My mother died while I was at the beach and so while my children spent their days on the shore, I spoke by phone with the many professionals who position themselves between the living and the dead. My thirteen year-old wanted to build a sandcastle. He has so many preoccupations these days, perhaps chief among …

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A boy grows

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 …

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Good men

Someone told me recently, “You’re a good man, Tony.” This made me think of a James Taylor concert I heard about once. In the hush between sets, someone in the audience shouted, “I love you, James!” Taylor stepped to the microphone and replied, “That’s because you don’t know me.” Do you ever feel some days that …

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On the giving of thanks, stomach viruses, and giant Christmas ornaments

Yesterday we cooked and cooked and cooked, and ate and ate and ate, and it was delightful, even the cheesy squash casserole that makes my children instinctively gag just from looking at it. Especially the squash casserole, you little ingrates. My friend Johnny Utah, newly paroled, spent Thanksgiving with us. In order to make up …

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Nerf war

A gymnasium strewn with upturned tables for barricades, a child-hearted husband and wife instigators of the fracas. Boys with single-shot pistols, automatics, rifles, rocket launchers, gathering to compare armaments. The older ones show the younger how to modify their weapons for greater velocity and range. Foam rounds fall from their pockets and collect around their …

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Memo to the NCAA

Perhaps it’s a new phenomenon, or perhaps I’m becoming more curmudgeonly, but it’s gotten that I cannot abide watching the aftermath of NCAA basketball games. It’s almost a certainty now that, in the event of a close game, at least one player on the losing team will wallow about on the floor, covering his face …

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Snips and Snails and Puppy-Dog Tails

Cathy Young, whose writing I sometimes enjoy, suggests in her Reason Magazine essay that the wildly popular Dangerous Book for Boys is dangerous indeed, because it reinforces traditional sex roles. Why couldn’t it have been titled “The Dangerous Book for Kids”? In service to this question, Young quotes a female friend to great effect: “‘Where …

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Three Reasons

Caleb has borrowed my Essential Charlie Parker, and I don’t think he’s ever giving it back. He likes to listen to it as he falls asleep, and so I hear it drifting down to me from his bedroom, the cool sound of that inimitable saxophone, and with it the knowledge that my seven year-old is …

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