Teenagers

Innocents At Home

It snowed the other morning north of Boston. It was the first, early snowfall of the season, if you take a very literal view of the term “snowfall,” because the flurries that fell didn’t amount to any real accumulation. They stuck tentatively to the ground, in clusters, like they were as surprised to be landing on the lawn as we were to see them. My 11-year-old woke and from her bedroom upstairs, and I heard a noise that sounded like she stepped on a puppy’s tail. She was squealing not about sledding or school closings, as you might expect. Instead, she hollered as she charged down the stairs, “Yippee! We’ve stopped global warming!” Her comment came without a hint of irony. How heartbreakingly innocent is that? She bounded into the kitchen and gave me a quick, happy hug. She might now be almost as tall as I am, but as […]

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Punked

When the flight attendant advises that passengers place the oxygen mask over their own faces before assisting those traveling with them, I always interpret this imperative more broadly—that I should take care of my own needs first, whether or not I’m strapped into an airplane seat, 30,000 feet in the air. Day to day, this doesn’t really happen, of course. What with dogs needing kibble and work needing to get done and kids needing an occasional warm embrace or a ride to school… my own needs often wind up in the back seat, shoved in the cushion crevice along with candy wrappers, loose change, old gum. But one thing I do hold sacred: In the morning, I don’t want anyone to bug me before I’ve cleared that first cup of coffee. Around my house, my daughter has learned to steer a wide berth for the 5 or 10 minutes it

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Notice to Staff and Stakeholders: Reorg

Greetings all staff and stakeholders of Coddled Teenage Boy Enterprises: It has come to my attention that there has been some confusion about your roles and responsibilities within the organization, which has led to infighting, yelling, and name-calling—this happened just yesterday, prior to 7 AM. Such behavior is both unprofessional and upsetting, and it is my job as the CEO and central “brand” of this enterprise to address this situation before it begins to negatively affect morale as well as my performance in the marketplace, also known as “school and social life.” First, a word about the incident that prompted this memo and took place at headquarters yesterday. Many of you, I know, heard it—or heard of it—and I need to clarify actual events to dispel any notion that the CEO of Coddled Teenage Boy Enterprises was at fault. Because, as you know, it’s never my fault. The incident took

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Looking for Eddie Field

Eddie Field had ears that stuck out like mug handles from either side of his head and a face that was a constellation of freckles. He wore his hair in a Boy’s Regular barber cut, cropped close to his head, which only served to emphasize both the freckles and the unfortunate angle of his ears. Eddie and I were in the same grade at school, and our parents belonged to the same summer swim club. I saw a lot of him as a result, but he wasn’t a friend, exactly. The club was a sort of working-class version of a Country Club—no tennis courts, no rolling golf green. It did have shuffleboard courts, though, and one or two of the courts were actually playable, if you avoided hitting the weeds forcing through the cracks in the cement. There was a musty-smelling piano in the clubhouse that retained most of its

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Summer on the Coast of Maine, Doggy-Style

I’m spending this week on the coast of southern Maine. If I had a choice, I’d spend most of the week as I am right now: in a low-slung beach chair, toes buried in the warm sand, and book propped open on my lap, pages ruffled by the strong wind off the water. Every few minutes I look up to inventory the surf, scanning for two heads—one belonging to my dark-haired daughter and the other her blond-haired friend—who are bobbing in the waves ahead of me. I have to squint hard to keep sight of them, in part because the sun is glaring, and in part because the tide is so low they seem a football field away. The girls appear as tiny figures, no bigger than lawn jockeys. The seagull stalking crabs a few yards in front of me seems as large as they are, as if this were

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The Shadow Knows: Watching Superbad with My Son

When I was a kid, in the 70s, I used to swipe my older brother’s Mad magazines. A lot of the humor was over my head, but that only added to the allure: This was a peep show into an unknown world, and I was lusting to grow up. One Mad feature I did get, however, was the regular series by Sergio Aragones: “The Shadow Knows.” It was a simple cartoon of all sorts of folks in all kinds of daily situations, but their shadows behind them projected (literally) their true thoughts or motivations. Like this:

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