With the full moon there’d be a strong tide to pull the shrimp from the warm lagoons to their spawning ground in the Atlantic. It seemed like all of God’s creatures needed love and were willing to risk everything for it . . .
Meet my son, Nils, almost three. Yeah, he’s adorable. Naturally, he’s a genius. He’s a lovely, hilarious kid with a protective instinct and a painfully intense desire to please, his mood-antennae constantly quivering, something which my wife and I must always take care to not exploit . . .
“My name is Brendan.”
He repeated the words as he walked down to the sidewalk . . .
“That boy Carlson is a liar and a rogue,” I tell my daughter Eve on a Saturday night, as she primps to leave for a house party in Brooklyn. “I wouldn’t go near that boy with a ten-foot pole . . .”
Jiao Lee, the first female owner of Golden BBQ, stood in the restaurant’s doorway. She watched the morning traffic on Hollywood Road in the heart of Hong Kong Central . . .
At the risk of coming off like a complete fucking asshole as usual, I would like to use this space to address a common misconception about parenthood . . .
Ashland, deep summer. It’s the one month the sun sets over steep Lithia Park only one hour earlier than everywhere else in Oregon, but at the jagged edge of town the hulking green shadows still pile up like a forest clear-cut. It’s the lull after Big Al’s Tennis Tournament, and it’s still a long haul ‘til Labor Day . . .
You haven’t seen her in over a year, not since that Labor Day weekend you took her up to your family’s lake house and she got so pissed at you for shooting up right away. “Danny, I was serious,” she said, like you were supposed to know that. But how the hell could you tell she was serious this time when she’d never been serious before . . . ?