Category: The Nipper

  • I’d go out on the ocean

    The manager of our restaurant is close personal friends with Joe Paopao, the Throwin’ Samoan. He used to come home at lunch bruised and battered from running patterns for him in the street. Our manager drawls his vowels, and flattens them, like the peaks of things threaten him. He lives on the west coast, where…

  • Full Stop

    The Nipper is learning punctuation. They were studying periods, exclamation points, and question marks in class. He told us they have hand signals for each one (they clap for an exclamation point, raise their eyebrows and touch their chins for a question mark, and they hold their hands out in front of them, palms facing…

  • The 7-Year-Old Uncertainty Principle

    The 7-year-old Uncertainty Principle (7yoUP) states that you may observe any number of 7-year-olds in your yard at an instant in time, but you can never actually know how many 7-year-olds are in your yard. You can know the *identity* of some of the 7-year-olds in your yard, or you can know the *position* of…

  • Apple Blossoms, Ornamental

    In the yellow golden light of morning, The Nipper and I walked, sometimes hand-in-hand, sometimes side by each, through the well-limbed vaulted cathedral that was my neighbourhood when I was a child. The streets were empty and the windows of the stately old homes stared unblinking as we crossed before them. One side street –…

  • My Underage Roommates

    Sometimes, you just have to stop thinking of them as your own flesh and blood and start thinking of them as what they really are – your underage roommates. This is how you will begin to understand where we as parents all go wrong. All of us. We forget what it’s like to have to…

  • Tent-caterpillar

    He’s just a baby now, you said, holding the fuzzy blue-and-black caterpillar on your hand. When he touches me it’s like little tickles, his baby feet and fingers are soft. But he will grow and change, you know. Soon he’ll be a butterfly or a moth or something and he’ll forget I ever held him…