A few years after he went to New York and started his work in advertising, my son came home for a weekend visit with a skateboard under his arm. He said he rode it to work. Over the next day or two, he stepped outside the house a couple times and rolled around the neighborhood…More
Tag Archives: youth
Home Economics–learning not to spend money
What’s for supper? When I was growing up, we called the evening meal supper in our house. At mid-day we ate our dinner. This was Midwestern parlance, perhaps typical of farm families, from which both of my parents came. At mid-day we didn’t eat “lunch.” A lunch was minimalist, more substantial than a snack, less…More
Play It
I came home from school one day, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with pencil and paper. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m helping you think of a name for your band.” Well that’s nice. That’s what I said. Grateful she had stopped saying “combo.” What I also thought was: Is there…More
Are You Going to Eat That?–on donut desire
Listen to a short excerpt from “Psyched,” an essay in American English, Italian Chocolate.More
Yick–wine and cheese, maybe
A Yahoo headline greets me this morning: “Study says cheese and red wine could boost brain health.” That’s good news. Two things I like, and I’m all in favor of brain health. The ten-year study, published in the Journal of Alzheimers Disease, involved 1787 people who participated in a Fluid Intelligence Test, “which provides a…More
The 00000 Club–don’t let this moment slip by
Pulling off on the side of the road, it could be argued, was a little dangerous. I was on a freeway just north of Detroit, in a lot of traffic. When I merged, I would have to merge fast. I didn’t care. The car I was driving was coming up on 100,000 miles. I wanted…More
Less Than One–the trail, the fail, the water
In the spring of 1973 I hiked the Appalachian Trail. A short segment of it, that is. Okay, I barely touched the doorstep. What started out with great ambition devolved into misadventure.More
There Will Be Horses
This girl I was dating in high school decided we should go horseback riding. We’d talked on the phone a lot. We’d gone to see to a few movies. We’d made out at a couple of garage parties. Our relationship was moving along. “Riding,” I said. She had friends who were very horse positive. A…More
Bridge–getting up off the mat
My freshman year of high school the wrestling team had no one to put in the 95-pound weight class. That meant at every meet the team would forfeit that match, giving the opposition five points for free, and an automatic advantage in the final score. The coach at the time was a guy named Jack…More