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Moon Boots

Our baby could not yet hold his head up. I lay on my parents’ living room floor next to my son, wondering how I was going to afford and overcome everything by myself, thinking I was too clumsy to take care of something as delicate as a child. And, in having these thoughts, I came undone.

Hometown Heroes

“White people have it so good, they sign up to die in another country,” she said.

I thought that was pretty grim. I mean, there are such things as heroes. But it’s hard to imagine a real war with people who look like Jack and Matty. The only war I ever hear about is the one my mom was born into and grew up in the aftermath of, the Korean War. The one she uses every excuse to squeeze into a conversation. Every chance she gets, she tells me how rough it was then and how much better we have it now.

Collectors

For years I’ve hauled my own records from house to house, city to city, relationship to relationship. They’ve outlasted two marriages. They’ve outlasted my father. They’ve outlasted pets and therapists. I’ve got a few rare 45s and some treasured signed Smiths albums, but also twelve-inch singles that are warped or skip. I’ve often thought about getting rid of all of them. Like nearly everyone else, I get most of my music from an app these days. But I’ve kept them the way I’ve kept a few good friends. All of us collectors. All of us records of everything that’s been pressed into us over time.

Look at Me Longer

I turned a corner and saw a tall, handsome man staring right at me. He wore a green sweatshirt, black basketball shorts, and white Nikes. His face was expressive, wise, large-featured. Five-o’clock shadow. A shock of salt-and-pepper hair.

He was me. I was looking into a mirror.

I usually thought of myself as a slob: Dry, blotchy skin. Big belly. Thinning hair. But my reflection was actually pretty nice-looking. I only became a “slob” when I realized who I was looking at, when I understood the mess behind the face.

The Healer

He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.

Zombie Mom

Denise figured the mom was dead; she had to be. The dad did the shopping now, and unless the mom was traveling for work for, like, a month or something, it was the only explanation.

Point of fact: Just last month the daughter and the mom had been talking while checking out at Denise’s register, and the daughter had asked for Lunchables, and the mom had said, “You will eat those over my dead body.”

Now the dad was buying five of them a week.

Ditch

This is the part of the story where someone tells me, You couldn’t save him. He had to save himself. Every time I hear something like that, I want to scream.

The Only Alternative

I’ve taken to telling young people that it takes ten years to get from age twenty to age twenty-five, five years to get from twenty-five to thirty, and three years, tops, to get from thirty to forty. So far, forty to fifty doesn’t seem like it’ll amount to much more than a long weekend. The people my age and older laugh knowingly, and the youngsters nod like Sure, sure, whatever you say, Gramps, and I am left, every time, wondering why the only thing we know to do with the stuff that terrifies us is to make jokes about it that aren’t really jokes at all.

Luxuries

A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day