Now that my grandma has died, though, I feel almost embarrassed when people comfort me. I find myself dodging and deflecting each earnest, brow-furrowed condolence with chipper sound bytes: “It was a mercy at this point.” “It was a long time coming.” “I actually had a great time with my family. It was so fun to see my cousins from out of town!” I refuse to play into the cliché.
The fullness of the characters’ lives and the variety of their responses to such ruthless adversity forced me to think of the victims of history as more than what their oppressors made them.
For a long time, my reading habits resembled a Michael Pollan polemic, if Michael Pollan had been trying to cure the Western diet with genre fiction instead of carrots: Read fantasy. Not much else. Mostly Tolkien.
A while ago my friend Ryan won three games of Club Keno in a row.
I’m not always good at saying what I mean to say, so here: Mom likes to tell me how you could soothe my crying as a baby by carrying me around the house, pointing out people in picture frames, and telling me stories about them.
As if knowing he was a caricature of a human, Grandpa Jack did most if not all of these things with a pipe in his mouth.
When going out for ice cream, getting an exemplary hard serve cone should be your primary goal.
This was not a lesson I knew as a kid. I wanted to save everything good for later. I ate all the cereal bits out of Lucky Charms and the raisins out of trail mix, leaving huge mouthfuls of marshmallows and M&Ms behind.
We worked side-by-side for two hours, me snatching glances to see how a septuagenarian was keeping up with me and her admitting I was “quite a worker!”
I am the fifth stranger here, and perhaps the strangest of them all. I am passing through this place. This will be my only night in the city, and then I will be gone.
