The Raging Elitist

You Belong Here

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One Way

I’ve hit a streak of immature male first person narrators. Each one seems to get worse. First it was Barbara Kingsolver’s incisive, stubborn junky Demon Copperhead, then Wally Lamb’s angry, self-absorbed Dominick Birdsee, and now, it’s Richard Ford’s smug, defeatist Frank Bascombe. Frank is brutally apropos of these three weeks between our return from Sapphire…
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Vacation’s End

On the first day of school, I got so tired of waiting in the carpool line at pickup time that I parked and walked up to the front. I laughed in the principal’s face when he asked if I was new to the school . . . Nope, dickhead, I went here for ten years, I…
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The Dog Days

So pronounced was the drought during spring and the first half of summer, that when an hours-long spell of rumbling thunder finally gave way to heavy drops one afternoon, Scotty yelled excitedly from the den, “It’s raining!” An eight-year-old boy thrilled by a little ordinary precipitation – that’s how dry (and scorchingly hot) it had…
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Mornings

I’ve been through many iterations of morning swim practice in my life, each with its own particular mix of pain and pleasure. As a nervous six-year-old summer leaguer new to the lowcountry, I relished the wonderful early morning heat of mid-June at Wild Dunes Dolphins practices, so complete that a little kid could be outside…
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