So many kids…
“I see so many kids that love being writers more than they love writing.” —Scroobius Pip I could probably count to a hundred, but if you’d asked me, I would’ve told you there were...
Category: Parenting
The stillness of an 8-year-old’s chest
I looked down on the ground. In the grass sat a little plastic coin, scuffed and scratched from little-boy cleats that had walked over it on the way to home plate. “Caught doing good,”...
Thank you, Mike Rice
Former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice is at best a very confused and disturbed human being. He is at worst a psychopath in need of inpatient treatment. Today, I suggest we should thank him...
What did you wash out of your mouth today?
I don’t even know how to start this, so I’ll just say it. My kid peed in my mouth today. There it is. My child—a boy who turns four years old in less than...
Second grade soldier
My son learned to roller skate less than 48 hours ago. He’d be ashamed to admit it, but there were tears at first, but then lots of skating. Twenty-four hours earlier, I took him...
Finish line
“I am as nervous as I’ve ever been.” That was my son this morning, up before the sun for his first youth triathlon. At eight years old, he would be among the youngest of...
What they don’t tell you about parenting…
is that one night everything will go perfectly, the boys will eat their dinner without complaint–with compliments!–and offer almost no protest at bedtime. You will pour a glass of wine, sit down to watch...
Father’s Day 2012
My kids and wife brought me breakfast in bed–good black coffee, some egg whites with chopped peppers and Sriracha–and four hand-made cards. There were gifts, too: a couple of beers and limes in a...
Some things never change
You can move from one house to another. You can mature beyond your age. You can grow up as fast as fate allows. But sometimes the unavoidable gravity of youth pulls your face back...
GoPro Hero 2: Experiments in fatherhood and beyond
My dad died the weekend before my 38th birthday. I didn’t learn until a few days later that one of the last things he did was buy me a birthday gift. It was a...
My blood runs cold…
The boy had just finished his homework in the playroom of our house. We were alone when he broke into song…a song a seven-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be singing. After I heard it, I...
Saturday Night Lights
The backfield tackle was the kind in which the quarterback is hit, hit again, and finally collapses under the weight of blockers, tacklers, and the inevitability of yet another sack. Less than two minutes...
Promises
There is nothing uplifting about a downmarket Las Vegas hotel. It’s simple living, hours in a stiff bed comforted by a flickering laptop screen, whatever junk food I could liberate from the giftshop downstairs,...