1.
My father died on Christmas Eve, 1986. I was three years old. When my mother broke the news, I responded in a startling way. "Death is just a figure of speech," I told her. Of course, at age

By the time Zoe and I started down the Overseas Highway, we had been living a nomadic lifestyle out of our 1995 Corolla for nearly four months. 

I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.

I wanted this essay to be about love. I wanted it to also be about my grandfather and Arkansas and my copy of Ain’t Doing Too B-A-D, Bad, a live jazz record by The Bobby Bryant Sextet. 

1.

Not long after my father died, my mother bought a brand-new bright-red Toyota Celica GT. She also started exercising regularly—a mile a day in the pool—and spent more time shopping for

1.

Walter Benjamin begins his essay “Unpacking My Library” like this:

“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”

I can relate. This last summer, I moved all of my possessions from an