Main Dishes

The first time Ava told me what happened, she did it the way kids do when something is too big for their mouths. She didn’t burst into tears. She didn’t run to me with dramatic words. She didn’t demand justice. She just stood in the doorway to my apartment, small and stiff, her pink jacket…

      In 1984, in the middle of what was supposed to be a sober, low-key congressional campaign, a familiar voice suddenly burst from the radio to attack candidate Nancy Culp. It was not a local political opponent, but her longtime television co-star, the man millions of Americans had come  to trust as the…

They were about to take my heart pills back and call security over a forty-dollar shortage—until the boy behind me saw my shaking hand and the old scar. “Sir, your coverage isn’t active.” The clerk said it like she’d said it a hundred times already that day. I stared at the little white bag on…

      Just a few hours before she died in January 2006, Shelley Winters made the decision to get married. There was no church, no  guests, no wedding ceremony in the usual sense. In a hospital room in Beverly Hills, a simple procedure was completed beside the hospital bed. The man who had been…

My husband Caleb Dawson went pale so fast I thought he’d swallowed his tongue. One second we were just another family on the highway outside Riverside, California with coffee in the cupholder and snack wrappers multiplying like rabbits, and the next second he was staring straight ahead like the windshield had turned into a screen…

The wind moved low across the cemetery grass as the final notes of the bugle faded into silence. Rows of folding chairs held grieving family members, veterans in pressed uniforms, church elders, and neighbors who had come to honor Colonel Nathaniel Brooks, a decorated Black combat veteran whose service had stretched across two wars and three…

I installed a camera to monitor my baby during his afternoon naps.   That was all. My wife, Lily, had been exhausted since giving birth, and our son, Noah, had started waking up crying in a way we couldn’t explain.   I thought maybe the monitor in his room would help us understand his sleep…

      Alpuccino tried to humiliate Clint Eastwood on live television right there on the Tonight Show stage in front of Johnny Carson in front of the studio audience in front of 30 million Americans watching from their living rooms. And Clint did not raise his voice. He did not stand up. He did…

My daughter, Hazel, stood beside my wife, Ivy, clutching a handmade drawing she’d spent all week perfecting. Her eyes were wide, drifting between the adults with a child’s innocent confusion. She leaned toward Ivy and whispered, loud enough to pierce the silence: “Mommy, why is everyone playing a game with their hands? Should I do…

  : George Burns walked onto the Tonight Show stage on January 10th, 1989 and did something that nobody in that studio had ever seen before. Not in 30 years of television. Not in 3,000 episodes. He stopped at the edge of the curtain, looked out at the audience of 300 people, looked at Johnny…