My Dog is Chelsea

• I went to a pumpkin carving party last week. Deciding to forego the traditional jack-o-lantern look, I carved my dog’s face into a pumpkin, although my friend said it more closely resembled a monkey and my neighbor thought it was a set of lungs. In any case, Chelsea certainly didn’t recognize her own face [...]

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My father had a workshop in the basement of our building. It was the best place in the entire house, I thought, with all sort of wonderful tools and crazy objects and sawdust. The sawdust lent itself, obviously, to an endless oven of Mississippi Sawdust Pies, which my brother and I ‘baked’ in the lid [...]

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A friend of mine suggested the other day that perhaps this whole recent-college-graduate-what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life thing wouldn’t be so difficult to deal with if only I had my father around to support me. I’m not sure how true that is — anyone who graduates college with a clear vision of their career path is simply an enigma, [...]

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My mother rarely tells stories about my father. Catch her in the right mood, though, and they’ll come out. I think, mainly, they are so few and far between because even now, thirteen years later, they make her sad. My mother was raised in a family in which, I suspect, emotion was equated with weakness, [...]

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