family

If You Would Like To Tell Me About Your Religion, I’ll Tell You About Mine

There is a proportional relationship between craziness and beard length.

I visited Toronto this past Memorial Day weekend and had a lovely conversation with a beautiful woman. (Aren’t good conversations just a little bit better when the other party is easy on the eyes?) We covered numerous topics, but perhaps the most important was a brief exchange of information about her religion and mine. And as I gazed into her cavernous eyes, the color of which my mind has, sadly, already forgotten, my mind danced with the promise of that which would not be.

A Beautiful Day

So, you want to meet my mother you say? Sure, sure I think we can arrange that. You’ll have to find that bastion of liberalism that she and my father live upon. It’s a hill overlooking a small pond and two fields in the middle of the cow and horse and chicken and Republican country of Central New Jersey. Oh, it’s beautiful – no doubt about that – and what it lacks in nearby facilities that would entertain a teenager, it more than makes up for with its beautiful seclusion and the leafy trees that hide my childhood home from the neighbors for about three quarters of the year.

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56 Up (2012)

Wake up. Eat. Go to work. Eat. Come home. Eat. Watch a movie. Eat. Go to sleep. Dream about eating. Wake up and do it again. Repeat for the next 25,000 days or so. Take a child and ask them about their hopes and dreams and expectations. Ask them again at fourteen. Then at twenty-one, twenty-eight, and onward, once every seven years for the rest of their lives. 56 Up is the story of us, of life, of change, and of accepting the successes and failures that are unavoidable if you are lucky enough to keep getting older. The eighth installment in the series continues its amazing report on the lives of a particular group of individuals whose experiences growing up and, for some, out of the United Kingdom are among the most universally relatable.

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