confessions of a reformed tourist
The thing about being young is that you can’t imagine forgetting. You can’t imagine that you won’t remember the name of that Italian movie, the one that takes place right after the war, the one where soldiers who aren’t supposed to be soldiers are slogging through a marsh, not knowing who they’re supposed to shoot [...]
Do you remember when I was 16 and going to Hawaii? You told me about the Honolulu Santiagos, your cousins who left Puerto Rico as teens, like you did. Except they went to Hawaii instead of New York. (They’d heard, you said, about the pineapple.) You wanted me to look them up. But Grandpa, I [...]
As long as I can remember, my dad has gone through “phases”. Like a kid who has just discovered baseball cards. He goes out and collects every single thing he can about baseball cards. These things he collects are both concrete (the cards themselves) and abstract (biographical details and stats and other such ephemera). And [...]
I have a long, clumsy history of screwing up my feet. Like the time I went camping and stepped on a rusty nail. Or the time I walked barefoot into the Hudson River and stepped on a broken bottle. And then there was the Donnie Wahlberg incident, wherein I decided to dismantle the cheap-o frame [...]
This photo of my mother was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a [...]
Last week I mentioned that “I’ve been treating blank pages like confessors since I was seven”. I imagine that sounded hyperbolic, but, as you can see, it’s true. Now. The cover is one thing. Actually reading it is something else entirely. I legit cringed at the thought. But my curiosity overwhelmed my trepidation and I [...]
When I was little I had a babysitter who was capital oh obsessed with Rick Springfield. She’d come over with her vinyl all carefully wrapped in a special case. She’d tell us how she was going to marry “her Rick”. And have his babies. Blah blah yucky yucky blah. I, the 6-year-old voice of reason [...]
My father’s father designed and built the house I grew up in. Legend has it that my mom went into labor while tiling the kitchen floor. When I was a kid my grandfather liked to tell me that I was almost born in the back of his pickup truck. Bullshit, I’d declare. The house on [...]
