Category Archives: Parenting

Saturday began just as it always did. The beginning of yet another weekend, a mundane day of relaxed obligation. Morning coffee with my wife. Beer and pub food with a friend or two. The anticipation of a casual get-together for a cooking competition that had become a monthly tradition with the men of my life. Men whose friendships I counted not in years, but decades. Continue reading →

The hubris of men knows no bounds. A naïve sense that we are masters of our own time and space.

We, the fortunate among us, think that our own life experience is some kind of normalized humanity and we behave as though this is how life has always been and how it always will be. We pay lip service to the suffering of the past and of others but find it difficult to imagine that we, ourselves, could experience such suffering—as though the suffering is some work of fiction wrought by authors of vivid imagination. Continue reading →

In every way, it seemed, my son’s life was returning to normal. He would call to chat from time to time, and report on his progress in school and he would talk about his plans for when he was done. He had been in touch with his cousin David, a former Marine who started his own business building oil derricks in West Texas. Continue reading →