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FRIDAY NIGHT FUN FEST

Until I was about four, we lived in the downstairs part of my grandparents’ two-family house. The downstairs apartment had a kitchen, a living room, one bathroom and two bedrooms -- one for Mom and Dad and one for my brother and me to share. So we had to move out after my sister Elizabeth was born, because then we needed a girls’ bedroom. We ended up just a few blocks away, so we could still walk to my grandparents’ house and our childhoods were full of trips back and forth to visit, make deliveries, sometimes just to trade one set of grownups for another. I’m not at all clear what that house had been like when my grandparents and their four children had all been at home. Probably they used both levels, and didn’t treat it as a two-family house. But I don’t know for sure. I think everybody lived in tighter quarters in those days. Growing up, I don’t remember many kids who had their own room. In my neighborhood, it was pretty rare to be an only child, so unless you happened to be the ...
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HOW WE GOT TO WHERE WE ARE

How remarkable that you and Jadia have ended up together, my mother-in-law says to me. After all those years, who could have predicted it? She is sitting in a woven plastic lawn chair in our backyard, her bare feet immersed in the little wading pool in which I sit with my youngest daughter, Isabella. Next to her, in an identical chair, sits my mother, who nods in agreement. On the other side of my mother is my father, who has recently had a stroke and doesn’t talk much at all these days. He is silent, immobile in his wheelchair, a blanket covering his legs although there is no chill in the September air and not even much of a breeze. Through the open kitchen window, I hear the voices of Jadia and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, my sister, younger than me by four years, is preparing sandwiches for lunch while Jadia nurses our newborn son, Jacob, who is to be baptised tomorrow morning. Our families are gathering for the event. My eldest daughter, Hannah, is already in. She has gone to the grocer...
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THE FALL

Mr. Walker had never been one of my favorites amongst my parents’ friends, but he sank to the very bottom of the list after I heard a rumor that my mother had had an affair with him. Heard a rumor. I struggled with how to say that. Heard. Was told. Learned. I settled on "heard a rumor" because to this day I’m not sure exactly what happened between my mother and Mr. Walker. It may have been more of a flirtation or an indiscretion than what I would today call an affair, but hearing about it as a teenager changed the way I looked at my parents and their marriage, which up until then I had thought of as rock solid in the way that I guess most kids did at the time.  We didn’t think a lot about divorce or infidelity then. Growing up in a Catholic neighborhood, those weren’t things that happened very often – at least divorce didn’t – and they seemed to me to be part of the world of movie stars rather than of the world my family lived in. I know something happened, because of the w...
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THE FIRST BARBECUE OF THE SEASON

When I was growing up, boys weren’t given names like Conor or Jason or Chase or Tyler or Maddox – the kinds of names my daughters rattle off as they chatter on the phone with their friends, debating who likes whom and whether this one is cuter than that one. We were all Johns and Williams and Davids and Roberts and Michaels and Richards – names squarely in the American canon, names that we shared with our fathers or uncles or cousins. Presidents had these names. They were familiar, reliable, masculine.  Even Patrick was considered a little bit exotic, because of course Pat could be either a boy’s name or a girl’s, a fact that wasn’t lost on one of my classmates who seemed to have been inexplicably listed on the official school roster as Patricia; a mistake that apparently went uncorrected year after year, as if the teachers had decided to hold onto a private joke at his expense. And if somebody was called Chip or Skip or Toby -- well, you knew it wasn’t his real name, just a nickna...
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