Status Updates From The Extraordinary Life of S...

This time we didn’t need to leave six inches for the Holy Spirit, as we did in grammar school.

If there was one thing I had learned about my mother, it was that she did not make idle threats.

“No way, young man. You do not call a young lady on the phone to ask her to the prom. You drive to her house and ask her proper.”

In hindsight, the trustees couldn’t very well have done that, not after passing me over. It would have been a tacit admission that they’d had ulterior motives for not choosing me in the first place and, perhaps, an admission that their motives for choosing Ernie had also not been honorable.

“you could look at it like you’d be opening the door for other kids of color.”

“Those kids will open that door on their own, in the classroom,” Mr. Cantwell said. “Just as you have done.”

Discrimination is difficult, because in its worst form, it is not overt. It is subtle.

My mother had spent her life advocating for me, ensuring that I received the same opportunities as any other child, and her maternal instinct, finely honed from those years, would always be to protect me. But at this moment I knew she was worried as to whether she could protect me from myself.

that guy, he’s not the guy you have to worry about. The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.

Burlingame wasn’t Mississippi in the 1960s. People weren’t wearing hooded robes and burning crosses on lawns, but that was not to say racism didn’t exist. Ernie had been taunted with the N-word on the football field and during basketball games. Once as a child he was accused of stealing in a store because the store owner believed that’s what colored people did.

Had it been left to her, I would have been enrolled in the local chapter of AA and never allowed to leave the house again. But that moment in the backyard, when my father called me a man, had been my rite of passage. He was telling me that I needed to make my own decisions in life, and I needed to decide for myself what type of person I intended to become, independent of what others thought of me.

“I went to high school, Sam, and I went to college. I have no desire to do it again. I can’t be in the car with you or live in your dorm next year. You’ve reached an age to make your own decisions. … Being a man means having to live with the consequences of our decisions, like getting up and going to work with a hangover. That was your lesson today.”

“Holy shit,” he said, spinning around and pulling off his earphones. “The Bay Bridge collapsed.”

wind tunnel known as Candlestick Park.

I had a modest history of failed relationships with women who could look past my eyes, but only far enough to see a successful doctor who made a decent living. None of them could see far enough to see a life with me.

It’s none of my business what she does, Sam; my business is being your partner and your friend.

“The best hangover medication you will find anywhere. Drink it.”

The first sip tasted awful. I groaned and put the glass down.

“You really are a baby. It’s supposed to taste terrible. It’s punishment for abusing your body.”

What the hell, Sam?

No pun intended, right?

I also did not remember finishing the bottle, though thankfully it had been only a quarter full. I chose it because it was Eva’s favorite; she liked to save it for special occasions. Well, it didn’t get any more special than when a man learns the woman he nearly sterilized himself for is cheating on him.

My parents had trusted me to behave as they had raised me, so much so that they apparently didn’t even suspect that the boy could be me. Then again, it might not have been trust at all that cloaked their eyes to that possibility. It might have been disregard, which hurt even more.

My father’s fingers pecked the typewriter keys—he typed faster with two fingers than anyone with ten,

angry at my mother for perpetuating the nonsense that my eyes were extraordinary and a precursor of the extraordinary life I was destined to live. There would be no extraordinary life. There would just be life, with all its trials and tribulations.