Kith & Kin

The most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me in my whole, entire life happened in my own living room. It happened around 3 am. And it happened when I was completely alone. The early ’90s, of course, were the pre-cell-phone and pre-Internet era. And sometimes in that era, a TV network would broadcast a live show that viewers could call into and ask a question. On this night there was one such live, national show: Lt. Col. Oliver North was interviewing radio personality Rush Limbaugh . At that time, you could hardly have named two people who were more widely known than Oliver North and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not worth belaboring why—the point is that both were tremendously famous. Having come across the show, I thought, “What an opportunity!” I had often thought about calling in to Limbaugh’s daily AM radio program, but (1) I doubted I would actually get through and (2)   talking to him live while 15 million people listened in was a pretty daunting idea. But that n...

It ’ s December 1, 2023, and my brother Eric reminded me this morning that Mom would have turned 86 today were she still with us. Home at lunch by myself, I looked at an old picture of her, taken before I was born. She is young and slim and attractive; she ’ s pinning on a corsage, and she looks very happy. I looked at the photo and thought about Mom long enough for a painful lump of ice to form in my throat, melt, and come out my eyes. She was an amazing person—one in a million isn’t enough; she was one in a billion. Here are a few scattered memories of her that flutter around in my head from time to time. Days of Joy Mom knew how to raise boys. She knew what boys were like and how to handle them. She must have come by this naturally, because she wasn’t raised with boys—only her older sister. Maybe it wasn’t that she was a natural at “raising boys”; maybe it was just that she wasn’t going to let anybody buffalo her, be it a screaming three-year-old or a disrespectful teen. B...

Remember that Youtube video of two seventeen-year-old guys trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone? It was funny to my generation because nothing seems simpler or more obvious to operate than a rotary phone. But to kids who have never worked one, it’s pretty much inscrutable. Early in elementary school a teacher asked our class to draw pictures of what we thought the world would be like in 1980 when we were to graduate from high school. My picture featured people going places in flying cars and zipping through the air via jetpacks. As I grew older, I read a lot of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury science fiction/science fantasy stories in which robots would do all the work for people and where huge computers that took up rooms full of floor space could answer questions. Surely those would be integral parts of our daily lives in the far-off future year of 1980! Well, I got a lot of that wrong. Even in 2022 (1980-plus-forty-two), we’re still not zipping around in flying cars. A...