Fires This Time and Last

I was a senior in high school when a jury acquitted the policemen who had been videotaped beating Rodney King nearly to death and Los Angeles descended into five days of riots, arson, beatings, firefights, and murder.

It is no longer possible for me to piece together what I knew or thought about the King incident before the riots. (From the vantage point of 2020, it is hard to remember how much less we knew about anything at the time, and how there was not yet this firehose of opinions about everything that is blasting at us every second of every day now.) 

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

We face a new peril, and—as always with a new peril—the shape and size of this one is difficult to reckon. How much risk is there, really, and how can this be such a personal question to answer? It is one of the great mysteries that so many people can look at the same set of facts and draw such different conclusions.

I am writing, of course, about my eight-year-old daughter's new skateboard, which she purchased with her own money last week. 

An Essay About Nothing, Breakfast in Bed, and the Family Circus

Eating in bed is a weird thing to do, if you think about it. There is a pronounced risk of getting crumbs in the sheets and spilling your coffee, and simply balancing a tray on your lap while you bring fork and knife into action is awkward enough to take a lot of the fun out of two strips of bacon. So where did Axl and Belle get the idea, independently of any suggestion on my part, that what Petra might most appreciate on this year's Mother's Day would be to enjoy breakfast without having to leave the warm embrace of her bed?

Like the Turtles

The turtles are alive, at least. That's a relief. For several years now, we've been keeping two box turtles, one male and one female, in our backyard. They reside in an enclosure with about 40 square feet of floorspace, contained by knee-high walls of cedar planking and featuring rocks and logs and a variety of plants, both cultivated and volunteer.

Every fall, after some set of signals in the weather sensible only to turtles, ours burrow underground and there remain until emerging sometime in spring. And every spring, we start to worry that they are running late and may have died. This year was no different. As the days ticked by, we began to fear the worst and wonder if we might never see them again. 

Everyone Loves a Parade

I was sure we would be the only ones without masks, but I was wrong.

It was a Friday morning, the 24th day schools had been closed for the virus. We’d been notified that a caravan of teachers would drive along all of the county’s bus routes so that they and their erstwhile students might wave at each other. In this monotonous time it was something to do.