confessions of a reformed tourist
I met Nick first. He was Canadian, from Toronto. Maybe he was 50, but he could have been younger. It’s hard to gauge the age of the white-haired. He walked around the yard with his shoulders titled slightly back, as if he were getting ready for his turn under the limbo stick. He was cute. [...]
You’re too big to climb on my back but too little to monkey up the tree. You’re too big to be carried everywhere but too little to make any of your own decisions. (Except for maybe sometimes you get to choose between chicken nuggets and sunflower butter.) I never said life was fair. Or that [...]
It’s just a little over a year now since we left Grenada. I considered writing an epic post about the cold, reverse culture shock and how diet Coke doesn’t really matter to me as much as I thought it did. But I figured I’d spare both of us that discomfort and instead share a video [...]
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 never fully understood what happened. Had I somehow unnerved him? Shaken his confidence in himself? In me? Did I simply not need him enough? It’s true that I was focused on other things. On my syllabi and my student planner filled with color-coded post-it notes. On my clipboard and my rough drafts and my [...]
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 [...]
Bean loves the library. It’s always difficult to convince him to leave. Today was no exception. I dealt with it by whispering, Bean. Honey, come closer. Mommy wants to whisper a secret in your ear. So he forgot about his tantrum and allowed me to pick him up. As I was helping him get his [...]
