When we were growing up, my two sisters and I weren’t allowed to watch several television shows. Married with Children had bad language and crass humor. The Simpsons was a little too irreverent for my parents’ taste. Friends had all the wrong goodies: promiscuity, children out of wedlock, divorce, profanity, a casual attitude toward pornography, […]
Every year on April Fool’s Day, my dad tells a lie. Of course on that particular day of the year, we don’t call them lies. We call them “jokes†or “pranks.†This technicality in nomenclature is supposed to annul the victim’s anger, deflate it like a red balloon. “Can’t you take a joke?†the perpetrator […]
I have one older sister and one younger. This birth order and the lack of brothers has both downsides and benefits.
At least when your uncle tries to pull a tooth that’s not ready, the pain is temporary, and you know who to blame. I’m still waiting to find money under my pillow for all the other bloody noses and ugly heartbreaks. I should have racked up at least a couple million bucks by now. I have a hunch that I’m the only one keeping track.
Let me make a suggestion. If you are fifteen and learning how to drive, angst-ridden for no good reason and straining to distance yourself from your parents who “just don’t understand you,†you need to remember that everything you say can and will be used against you. Your intellectual parry-and-thrust is less impressive than you […]
My genius as a child consisted not only of my proclivity for revolutionary ideas but also of my knack for identifying and nurturing the brilliant ideas of others. When Will Burton came over to play and suggested that we throw all of my younger sister’s dolls into the Little Harpeth River, I knew he was […]
I never swerve to hit animals. They run out in front of me. On my way to have breakfast with friends before school, I tagged a doe. I’d even slowed down when two other deer ran across the road. I looked both ways and let my foot off the brake, then wham! She came from […]
The tires made a whizzing sound as they accelerated, and I thought, “Uh-oh,†as her hair turned into a bird’s nest around each black tire.
