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Our Star

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as time. Then bang!—the first particles, cooling into the first atoms, clumping into the first nebular clouds, collapsing into the first stars, shining out the first light, unspooling over billions of years to make it all happen: the joy, the love, the pain, everything. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows. But here we go.

Roots and Rhizomes

I know now that you aren’t born a parent. But you are born with inherited traits and proclivities that you end up either nurturing or starving out. Life, in my experience, requires a lot of deadheading. I’m glad my father taught me how to do it at such a young age.

Complexion

A prominent birthmark, an elaborate skin-care regimen, a secret ancestry

Driftless

Mike had grown up in a conservative rural town, and most of his family still lived in that area. His relatives tended to be more liberal than their neighbors, but there were differences between us. Some had told Mike they supported peaceful protesting, but not the rioting in Chicago and other cities, nor the looting that sometimes happened when groups of people marched through the city declaring that Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t like I supported rioting or looting either. That summer, I had shed silent tears the first time I’d ridden my bike down Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago’s busiest streets, past all the stores whose owners had preemptively boarded up their windows in case the protests turned violent. But I understood the protesters’ rage, because it was also mine. Sometimes, to make myself feel better, I fantasized about grabbing a baseball bat and ramming it through a window, any window, over and over and over again.

Dear Old Dad

What would Young Dad think about Old Dad? Young Dad: professional Alpine ski racer, multi–Emmy Award–winning sports cameraman, and documentary filmmaker—handsome, tan, rugged, jovial. Young Dad, steering the outboard motorboat to Sandpiper Island in Maine, zipping around town in his burgundy Saab, flying around the world for work. Young Dad, skillfully extracting our splinters, icing our bruises, reassuring us about hurricanes and heartbreak.

If Young Dad met Old Dad—hunched, plodding along the beach in water shoes and a straw sun hat, arguing in favor of gluing a live snail onto an art project—Young Dad would have been nice to the old guy. He would have gone out of his way for a chat. But if he discovered the old guy was him, I know exactly what he would have said: You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Glimpses

This is how we say I love you in my family:
“I stopped the truck to move two toads off the driveway last night.”
“The walking iris has three blooms on it today.”
“On my way to work, a fox crossed the road with a mallard in its mouth.”

Missing

One week before the planes flew into the towers, I secured my first full-time, salaried job. I had applied to work for the New York City Parks Department at the suggestion of my roommate, Ethan. He’d recently quit his Parks job—not because he hadn’t liked it, but because he was, by his own reckoning, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, brought on by the unexpected death of his father a few years earlier. Ethan regarded me as lucky because my mother had at least told me about her cancer diagnosis before she’d died. From his father he’d inherited a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, just one subway stop and a short walk from Central Park. Ethan sublet my room to me for $667, a remarkably low rent for a building with a doorman, pool, and gym.

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.