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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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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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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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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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On an after-dinner walk during the boys’ first week of summer break, I was suddenly stricken by the realization that Danyelle and I are nearly exactly halfway done raising children, at least in the sense of housing them while they’re still legal minors. Cartter is a couple months away from his tenth birthday, and Scotty…
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Summer tried to sneak up on us this year. Baseball games, summer league meets, and evening walks worked their way in around the edges of our routine and occupied the space in our lives allotted for pleasant distractions. It all seemed so easy and whimsical until I looked at the calendar and suddenly realized –…
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Even before I had children, I always imagined my kids would start getting much more tolerable between eight and ten years of age, that at that point they’d finally start to become real people whom an adult might deem acceptable company. Now that Scotty is eight, and Cartter nearly ten, I realize that in one…
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For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to succumb to the stress of spring’s arrival – the skipping ahead an hour, the blanket of pollen that covers the lowcountry for weeks on end, the portent of summer and the dramatic shift in the family dynamic that season brings – I thought this was the…
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Watching my nine-year-old swim his first ever 500 free, I stood on the deck and shook my head in disgust while writing down 50 splits of forty-two and forty-three seconds. Cartter was babying his race, swimming his way to a time that didn’t reflect his preparation or his ability. A week prior I’d watched him…
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In the leadup to the State Championship swim meet, I kept on trying to explain to people the unlikeliness of my son Cartter’s event lineup, particularly the rare combination of youthful inexperience and high stakes that would kick off his weekend. “South Carolina Swimming Age Group Champs” in Greenville would be his first travel meet…
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The Raging Elitist 