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If anything, I’d classify myself as a Buddhist. I believed that every living thing came from the earth and was to be respected.

running from a faith that seemed to solve every problem not with a solution but with an excuse.

“It’s God’s will.”

“Most people who own a gun never have to use it. It’s the threat of the gun that deters the need.“

When asked why he never deviated from his attack, no matter the opponent, Tyson replied, “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.”

I knew in a way that I was Daniela’s Pastor Brogan. I was the person fate had destined to protect her from the bully. The irony was she and I had shared the same bully.

“How are you holding up?” Ernie asked.

“Like an actor backstage in the green room waiting to go on again.”

Their presence gave me back my identity and validated my existence beyond the role of the unknown grieving boyfriend.

good person. bad person wouldn’t be that honest. They wouldn’t feel any guilt at all. bad person would have punted responsibility and told her family that he wanted nothing to do with any of it. But I know you. And I know that you’ll go to your grave and never tell another living soul that she cheated on you. Her parents will bury daughter they loved & get to keep all memories.

Eva’s beautiful face had been spared damage, and that was all the attendee showed me. But as a doctor, I understood from the way the sheet draped her body that much of her torso had been crushed and disfigured, bones broken. She’d likely died instantly.

He sobbed, great gasps and moans that prevented words but that I understood. He’d been bearing up for his wife, for Eva’s sisters, for the entire family. With the details of Eva’s remains taken from him, he could mourn his daughter.

I filled a second bowl with water and set it out of harm’s way; Bandit tended to slide his bowl all over my tile floor seeking every nugget.

Eva did not like pets. She reacted to any piece of dog hair on her clothing as if it was radioactive.

When I started to wear contact lenses, I put up bland, brown veil of normalcy not only to rest of world but to the person on other side of mirror. I no longer had to concern myself with lingering stares or questions. I no longer had to deal with my condition.

I hadn’t dealt with issue. I’d simply covered it up, literally and figuratively.

opportunity to begin not just accepting who I was, but liking that person

how precious life is, and how fragile. One minute you’re celebrating graduation, and the next your father is near death. One minute you’re getting ready to experience a World Series, the next you could be dead under a pile of concrete. Too short.

You talk about your mother not knowing you’re alive for a couple of months? Big deal, Hill. My mother has never known I was alive.

“We shared our first moments together, the three of us, in a hospital,” and she told me again about the day I was born.

“Money will not dictate your father’s comfort,” she said.

~~~~~

“If Dad can’t come home, we’re going to bring home to Dad.”

pony-wall partition

a cool breeze that rustled the leaves of palm trees and sent ripples of sparkling diamonds across the surface of the Crystal Springs Reservoir in the valley below.

“If your father has been sentenced to live out his life in a facility, it will not be a prison sentence,” she’d said after leaving one of the facilities. “That place had all the warmth of a mortuary.”

The nurses brought in a hospital bed for my mother. “I’ve slept with that man for twenty years,” she said, weeping. “I’m not going to stop now.”

For better or for worse—and too often it is for worse for so many of us—adulthood had arrived, whether I wanted it to or not.

He needed me to be the man of the house. I was just eighteen, but then, so were some of those men taken from the jungles of Vietnam on a stretcher.

I recall this moment as the moment I became a man. It had not been my first beer or hangover, or the first time I’d gotten laid, as I had thought. It had not even been earlier that day, when I’d tossed my blue graduation cap into the air. It was the moment my mother needed me, and I was there for her.

But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.

~~~~~

My mother had ironed the fabric until the pleats could cut paper.

expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.

“None of us is getting out of here alive.”

“You know, son, it’s not the school that makes the student.”

I’d be worried my children would be like me, you know. Have my eyes.

“They should be so lucky,” she said.

“Lucky?”

“Yes. They made you the person you are, and I happen to believe you’re a very good person, Sam Hill.”

I’d applied to the University of California schools, which had negligible tuition for California residents and were a better fit for my family’s budget.

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