Against my closed eyelids I see us young and in love. We are riding off into the English countryside to our newlywed bed at a cozy B&B in the idyllic market town of Oundle, where a single road winds through old stone row houses and small local shops, about an hour from Cambridge University. Our cheeks are rosy, our eyes twinkling.

I just like to ride by the Summit Avenue rowhouse where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, his first novel, and ran out into the street to stop traffic and spread the news that Scribner’s had agreed to publish his book. Fitzgerald’s exuberance is now offset by a plaque mounted outside the rowhouse listing it as a National Historic Landmark but not saying why, a more modest, Minnesota-like approach for sure.

The downside to the parent taking over the project is that the construction and race turns into an adult competition. We always strive to teach our children honesty and serve as an exemplary adult role model. My father wasn’t around much to teach me that sacred tenet.

But the truth is, no one is completely fearless, and even courageous Lukas Von Dukas had his deep, dark, secret, inner fears. Those are the best kind. As a caring older brother, I had a natural instinct for quickly identifying these particular fears and using them to their fullest advantage – for character development, that is.

I didn’t have a sandwich for lunch. I had ramen. I made your sandwich and then made ramen for myself because I didn’t want to use the rest of the bread on a sandwich for me. You hate it when I use the rest of the bread. You hate it when I use the rest of the bread, even though you rarely eat it. You just like knowing that the bread is there as an option.

A memory: A fire in a pit crackles away the last drops of water trapped in kindling gathered after an evening storm. If I get too close I may crackle too. My skin is sticky with incense so pungent I can taste it. I write by the moon. My words are fireflies. Orion keeps me safe.

​Andy understands that there is a younger part of me that is locked into this character, something naïve and almost smart enough to understand how big the world is, but not quite aware yet of how much of it I’ll never fully comprehend. He doesn’t watch it with me: he allows me to enjoy the world that doesn’t exist, even if it also throws a weird, true shadow in our universe.

18. Three plastic Christmas trees we used before we switched to live ones. The smell of pine new, the task of feeding it water a hassle, the tiny leaves remaining in our apartment weeks after it was thrown on the curb. Sometimes I miss the ease of that former plastic.

19. A recorder the size of a brick I threw away in secret because I accidentally recorded myself saying bullshit when I was ten.

One day in June of 2019, during Darriss’ fourth year of being in jail, his mother Minda and I drove two-hours from Lowell, where we both lived, to Norfolk to visit Darriss. I left all the stuff I had in my pockets inside Minda’s car, everything except my ID and a paperback I’d brought to read in the waiting room. My clothes were soaked with sweat from my anxiety and they felt tighter than usual.

Not 50 years after Reconstruction and a decade after the World War I ceasefire, America sought fresh, bold voices—new visions of a united country, pacification. But Faulkner and Toomer weren’t interested in propaganda. The two writers revealed to the nation its bitter truths. They painted a country marred by obsolete traditions and crumbling heritage, revealing festering racism.

While more decent and responsible audiences should connect the dots between the skinheads’ deeds and their bloody fates, several others have missed the point. But it takes an overwhelming amount of cognitive dissonance to pretend that Russell Crowe as Hando, leaning against a fridge with a skeleton-bone arm tattoo and holding a glass of milk against his head like James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause,” wasn’t supposed to look sexy and cool.

Cameramen watched and filmed as contestants cheated on their boyfriends while perhaps too drunk to realize it, were nearly pressured into having sex with discomforting foreign men at parties, and sobbed after being given no other option than forfeiting, to kiss an openly racist male model while filming a commercial.

The lack of Black women’s vantage point on the issue is curious. After all, Timberlake’s apology was addressed in part to a Black woman and referenced racism and misogyny. (I am guessing neither Timberlake nor his publicist know the term misogynoir.) And, Timberlake fell out of public favor partly because of his actions towards a Black woman.

Twice I have employed the one-week follow-up, the first time when my tenderfoot, Rebecca, struggled to continue flossing after giving birth. Outside a café, a new baby in her arms, she confessed to me to breaking her newly acquired habit of flossing.

Why do I need this fictionalized version of Greg? By keeping him on a pedestal, I can deny my anger toward him. For years, I’ve viewed him and his lifestyle through rose-tinted glasses while being seriously, albeit subconsciously, angry at him.

They ask you and you share a little about the ghetto, no father, mother with two jobs, being a latchkey kid, gang wars. They are quiet, then excited. They say, “Oh my God, what a childhood, yet here you are.” They say that they could never have accomplished what you did: master’s degree, house in a beautiful neighborhood, public admiration for your work in domestic violence, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful children.