Essays

The challenge wasn’t just the spice drawer with the unopened 30-year-old jar of coriander and the multitude of little packets of red pepper delivered with more than a decade of pizzas. Not just the UCLA T-shirt I bought in 2007 on my son’s college tour. Not the second-best stew pot. No, when I got right down to the bone, it was the last tangible relics of my father I had trouble letting go.

Barely daring to breathe, I brought the box downstairs. I unsealed it and clicked open the dusty case. And there was the Remington, gleaming like the day Cousin Minnie had presented it to me.

Watching the NBA this season makes me think of empty gyms not as unfortunate pandemic protocol, but as basketball returning to its purest state.

Though we fight every step up and out, we ascend by sheer muscle of will, purpose, and service. The convergence is with our highest and best self. The blade of change slices our tender middle; we smooth the jaggedness of some force we didn’t see coming.

For years, I thought I was the sole oddball in my family obsessed with memorabilia. If not for an impromptu visit to my Aunt Doris’s house, I might never have known otherwise.