Category: Dear Elite

  • Theater Critic

    Theater Critic

    During the six-and-a-half years I’ve been observing the behavior of my younger son Scotty, I’ve sometimes thought that the boy might end up being well suited for the theater. Never mind the importance he places on school productions, the way he draws pictures of himself performing in the days leading up to such events, the…

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  • Don’t Forget Your Lunchbox

    Don’t Forget Your Lunchbox

    Driving away from my children’s school on a Friday afternoon in early October, I’m distracted enough to make it the full length of the city’s seawall without fully understanding the discussion going on between my six-year-old in the backseat and my wife sitting next to me. The light rain falling on the minivan’s windshield is…

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  • Social Life

    Social Life

    A couple with children the same age as ours, one whose company Danyelle and I both truly enjoy, one we invite over for dinner and drinks; adult friends who fit into our lives in a way that is neither forced nor left over from the time before we had kids – long have I waited…

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  • This Last Day of Summer

    This Last Day of Summer

    “And every evening, when Frith has done his day’s work and lies calm and easy in the red sky, El-ahrairah and his children and his children’s children come out of their holes and feed and play in his sight, for they are his friends and he has promised them that they can never be destroyed.”…

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  • I’m Not Kidding: Teasing is My Love Language

    I’m Not Kidding: Teasing is My Love Language

    Sometimes, when I have a moment alone with the boys, I’ll be overcome by the impulse to tell them I love them, to which my younger son Scotty might reply, “You say that, but you always tease us.” Scotty is six, and to his mind the ideas of teasing and loving are mutually exclusive. To…

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  • Fish Brain

    Fish Brain

    Over twenty years ago, I was humbled by my childhood dog, a golden retriever named Daisy, and ever since, I’ve felt that dogs come by certain kinds of wisdom more easily than humans do. I was sitting on the front steps at my father’s house when it happened. I’d just carried Daisy’s cancer-ridden body to…

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  • Reflections on the Upper Lake

    Reflections on the Upper Lake

    When I was a boy, my Poppin would wake me up at dawn to go fishing on the Upper Lake. With the attic fan droning in the upstairs bedroom of the Laundry, the house so named for its use four generations prior, I’d lift my head from my pillow and see Poppin’s hulking figure silhouetted…

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  • Protected: Vacation Assassination

    Protected: Vacation Assassination

    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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  • Outside In: Modeling Values for Young Athletes

    Outside In: Modeling Values for Young Athletes

    Last week my wife and I took our boys to see Inside Out 2, Pixar’s animated portrayal of a 13-year-old girl’s mental struggle during hockey camp. In Riley’s outer world, she’s on the cusp of puberty, destined for a new school away from her current friends, and eager to impress at camp so that she…

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  • Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

    Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

    I have a little bit of guilt now that I’ve passed the coaching responsibilities for our neighborhood team on to the next person. At first it stemmed from the way the kids looked at me when I walked onto the pool deck, confused, forlorn even. That’s passed, though. Nearing the season’s end, my former swimmers…

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