It’s that standing appointment you have, when you find yourself sitting across from your therapist, those doe eyes, pursed lips, expressionless, with her flowery cardigan and placid disposition, in her suburban office in a converted townhouse in the East End that reeks of potpourri and scented candles, littered with overstuffed…

It’s Christmas Eve, and you’re high on oxy, lying flattened on the floor in the middle of the living room, legs straight, arms stretched, staring up at nothing, frozen in this moment, lights out, shades pulled, in the dark and quiet, only the listless flicker from the last glowing embers…

It was Thanksgiving afternoon and a line had already formed in front of Lilabelle Durham’s upscale boutique in Poplar Square for her first ever Black Friday Sale that was set to begin at midnight. Thanks to Lilabelle’s extensive marketing efforts (she had taken an online marketing course over the summer)…

It was the third Saturday in August, and the Birchmont Village Potato Festival was in full swing, having been resurrected after an unimaginable seventy-year absence by Hank Walters Bryant, the ranking member of the Birchmont Village council and devotee of all things spud. Hank had happened upon a write-up touting…

Sometimes you see that girl across a crowded room, and your eyes meet, and in an instant time stands still, and you’re lifted slightly lighter on the inside, and the weight of the world slips from your shoulders, and you stand a little straighter, a little bolder, and you forget…

Against perhaps her better judgment, my wife bought me a skateboard for Christmas this year. It was not without some consternation and deliberation on her part, along with my repeated assurances that I wasn’t going to break my neck. “I used to skateboard all the time,” I told her. “My…

There must have been forty of us, maybe fifty, kids of all shapes and sizes, crammed into that stuffy gym after class, the place reeking of sweat and dirty socks and farts, chattering, fidgeting, roughhousing. It was chaos on that Monday afternoon at three-forty-five, the first day of basketball tryouts…

“Everything is dead and gray and frozen,” Sadie says to me as we take a walk, down the street, to that little park at the edge of our neighborhood, the three-quarter-mile track that’s presently buried in slush and ice and snow, the stubborn remains of the winter storm that blew…

I can still remember, as a high school senior after having been accepted into Duke to my utter amazement and absolute joy, while watching a Duke men’s basketball game on the grainy television set in the basement of my buddy’s house and seeing Coach K scowling and prowling along the…