The summit of the gleaming playground slide towered above me. The only reason I kept clomping up the 3,000 steps to the peak was the shouts and jeers of the crush of fellow kindergartners pushing me upward even as I wriggled for an escape. About a half-mile up, I stammered, “I... I changed ...

I’d never heard such an outrageous lie. I was ashamed to be related to the man who told it to me. “JH,” as I’ll call him here, expected us to believe that he completed a repair project on his vehicle WITHOUT A SINGLE SNAG. Yeah, right. No man in the history of time ever finished a ...

Nothing so tried my young patience as the words, “Allow six to eight weeks for delivery.” Six to eight weeks took as long as three years to crawl along by a little boy’s hourglass. The only thing that took more time to arrive than “allow six to eight weeks for delivery” was ...

I still wonder what time it was when those two trains crossed. You know the ones. We met them in third-grade math class story problems: “A train leaves the station in Chicago at 3 p.m., headed to Cleveland, at an average speed of 47 mph. Another train leaves Cleveland at 4 p.m. for Chicago ...

I miss road maps. They were like fitted sheets for the car — wonderful to keep things in place, but nearly impossible to refold. Sometimes it was easiest on your blood pressure to crumple them into a ball and cram them into the glove box, which is your closet or junk drawer on wheels. We ...

I didn’t notice my wife sneaking into the living room. I fumbled for the remote. Too late. I was caught on the wrong channel. “Again?” She shook her head and tut-tutted. “That stuff isn’t real, you know.” “It was just a peek,” I whined. Terry glared at the screen. Two sweaty ...