A few hours laterDad called again. The vet had put his Great Dane, Sophie, on antibiotics, and, figuring it was all basically the same thing, he had started taking them. I'm just not sure of the dose,...
It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world...
There's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.
Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you...
Even then that without them, I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy—and
You’ve got her mad now and there’s no turning back. All she has to do is go to the authorities, saying you molested her. Is that what you want? One little phone call and your life is ruined.’ ‘But I d...
You’re the man now, she said to me after my father died, you’re the man. Then she turned to Popeye, our calico tom, and said, You’re the cat now, Popeye, you’re the cat,
You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you. If there’s a disaster, for instance, and someone tells me he donated fi...
You’d think I’d have addressed my drinking, at least in the privacy of my diary, but it’s rarely mentioned. To type that word—alcoholic—would have made it real, so I never recounted the talking-tos I...
Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you we...
When it happens to you it's a national tragedy— you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.
When apple-picking season ended, I got a job in a packing plant and gravitated toward short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would...
When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Ch...
When I saw myself through my parents’ eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as...
What were you asleep? Helen would say as I opened the door. I've been up since five. In her hand would be aluminum tray covered with foil, either that or a saucepan with a lid on it.Well, I'd tell her...
What they hear is senseless noise. It’s like us trying to discern emotion in the hum of a hair dryer or the chortle of an engine as it fails to turn over. That’s the drawback but also the glory of cre...
What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.
What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.
We're not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you're more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award.
We'd all turn our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would...