Listen:
My mother texts me from my dead father’s phone on the third day of the National Football league draft. She promises she only texts me from his phone as if that will placate the sheer terror that overwhelms me every time his name pops up on my lock screen.
He’s been dead less than two months.
Too soon, mother. Too soon.
Read MoreTo keep us out of trouble, my mom put us in karate class. I hated the pajama pants and all the superstition. But before I knew it, I was lined up and bowing to some guy in a karate gi with an American flag design. Since Mom was frugal, we took classes in the recreation room of the church. Sensei Gomez only charged $20 a month.
Over time, I enjoyed it. I made friends with Freddy, or Speedy as we called him. Like a champion chess player, he would predict your move, evade and strike you all in a blink.
Read MoreHe was sitting on the couch when he got the call. They called it a couch though in actuality it was a futon left by the previous renters of the apartment and perhaps even the renters before them. No one knew the origins of the futon. No one had been around long enough to trace all of its stains.
Read MoreOn the tennis courts, Edward was the new guy—the greenhorn, the rookie—though not necessarily because of his age. At 64, he figured he was on the young end, but maybe not the youngest. They were playing doubles on two courts—eight guys altogether. He was the eighth. The others had apparently been playing every morning since they (he and his wife, Ellen, God rest her soul) moved to the Cape.
Read MoreI wandered into the grand ballroom of the Genesis Convention Center in Gary, Indiana, where Bob Uecker was the featured guest at a sports card show. Among the smell of egg muffins and beer farts, overweight middle-aged guys hovered over three rows of tables full of plastic-wrapped card displays and open binders. Piles of sawdust and roofing nails from last week’s home show littered the same red, blue, and yellow kaleidoscope carpet as my friend Jared’s bar mitzvah thirty years ago.
Read MoreThe habitual smokers lit their cigarettes in front of the pachinko parlor. Their grey hair was plated to their heads, their faces scarred by age, their suits disheveled, and eyes reflecting a dull gleam. In an almost perfect unison, lulled by an exhaled cloud of smoke, they let their heads fall back onto the wall in a movement of fatigue. As the parlor doors slid open, the sound of metallic balls rattling in plastic trays, coins clinking, dropping into slots, the siren call of mechanical voices, all boomed in their ears.
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