Kith & Kin

Early in the 1990s Cindy and I bought our first house. It was a homey little place that suited our growing family well. It was less than 1000 square feet, but it had a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and three bedrooms. I remember decorating the third bedroom in preparation for the arrival of our first baby girl. That was a new experience and a lot of fun! We lived, as we told everyone, “next to the farmers’ market on Rutherford.” The street was North Acres Drive, and it was shaped like a tennis racquet—one two-lane road that led both in and out with a loop of houses at the top. We lived in #2, the house you’re facing when you come to a stop at the top of the handle. As I cast my mind back over the few years we were there, I find a set of disjointed but mostly warm memories. . . . ·        One Father’s Day I came out of the bedroom and saw little Ben, probably three or four years old, eating his brown-sugar toast (cut up into bite-sized piec...

Author’s Note: I wrote this story over twenty years ago. As I often do, I’ve taken an actual event and related it, I hope, with some humor. Is every fact strictly true? No, but at least 90% of it is. Or maybe 80%. Either way, I hope you enjoy it! So my brother Eric and his wife, Aimee, want us all to go to Acres of Fun to let the kids play and for a game of Laser Tag. I am almost forty years old; I do not want to play Laser Tag. It is stupid and pointless. It is beneath my dignity . . . way beneath it. But I do not tell anyone that I am feeling this way. I do not want to be petty. So we get to Acres of Fun. It takes about three hours for the guy at the desk to figure out how to charge us for six kids and four adults. You’d think they’d never had a group this big come in before. So then Eric gets us all paid for (he and Aimee are paying for this, which is another reason I have vowed not to grouse), and the kids go over to the “Soft Play” zone. You know, that’s like a McDo...

It was September of 1980. Mom and Dad had brought me down from Ohio to South Carolina to start college, and once again Dad was getting on my nerves. A lot of things that Dad did irritated me. His staunch standards and inflexible beliefs. The way he made us boys work on our property whether we wanted to or not. (Oh, those dreaded words on a Friday night: “We’re going to drag some brush tomorrow, boys.”) Even the way he came into my bedroom every Sunday morning at eight and put his hand gently in the middle of my back and said, “Time to get up.” And now here I was, eighteen years old and more than ready to be on my own, free from the responsibilities and frustrations of home, and he seemed determined to get on my nerves one more time. Anyone who’s lived in the dorms (nowadays “residence halls”) at a university knows the importance of arriving early each semester to claim your storage space and bunk. I had arrived after only one other roommate had arrived, so the pickings were still prett...