teetotaler

Which is to say, some days you are happy to be alive, and you know you’ll never forget the feeling or lose the knack. And other days you do forget; you do lose it. Nothing happens in order, and you have to do it over and over again.

and to be present and around people, both familiar and strangers alike. My time in that space has shaped my entire life. I am

and alcoholism.” There was nothing to do in these old mill towns but fuck, get fucked up, or fuck somebody else up.

When you walk into the nave, everything opens up and the inside seems even bigger than the outside, somehow. It would feel massive to anyone at any age, but when you’re six and enveloped by the shadow of the enormous organ as you follow its countless pipes reaching up and up and up to a ceiling so far away it might as well be the sky, it was so

Stories matter to my family. My earliest memories are of my parents reading to me. Every time we moved, they always left our hand-me-down chairs and rickety tables on the curb, knowing they could get cheap furniture elsewhere. But the books were packed away in boxes and stuffed into whatever old, rusted car the family was driving that year.

ignominy

Both were smart, itchy, unsteady people who had read too many books, if such a thing is possible, and I’m pretty sure it is.

In the rectory, the grand tableaux of suffering and sacrifice, told in gold and dark polished wood and every shade of glass, was put aside for half-full ashtrays and bulky furniture upholstered in something green and plastic that didn’t even try to mimic an animal’s hide.