Chuck typically concluded his lecture about my father’s miserable dental habits by shaking his head dejectedly and admonishing me: “What a waste, David! Don’t let it happen to you. Be wiser and have those checkups.” Not that I had a choice. Dental misbehavior was not an option for a youngster with Uncle Chuck in the family. He saw to it that I was in his office every few months. I dreaded those visits and could understand why my father had forgone them, whatever the consequences.

All afternoon the drone of the Simon’s two-ton splitter. The hydraulic blade cracks chainsaw chunks. Bucket-loads of splits divided equally among four trailers, Eddie’s old Ford tractor moving back and forth from the waiting pile. Sawing, splitting, loading, unloading.

I put gin and ice in a dirty glass. Lot watched me. But more than just him watched. A ghoul inside of his mouth watched, smirked.

“There’s an hour left,” I said. “Don’t judge me.”

He stared.

But, yesterday, Daffodil was floating at the bottom of her bowl, on her side. She looked bloated, orange and white and puffy, like her kidneys weren’t working. Do fish have kidneys? Her eyes were open wide. Her mouth was still, no longer opening and closing like it had been doing for ten years.

Out of all of us, Blair was the only one with a boyfriend. I mean, you know, as much as any ten-year-old can have a boyfriend. His name was Jacob, and I thought he looked like an alien, a big dumb alien. I had no proof that he was dumb. I don’t think I’d ever even spoken to him. He just had one of those faces that told you long before he opened his mouth that he was dumb.

I truly am sorry for that and I wish I’d done things differently. He didn’t deserve that. I have issues, for sure, and I’ve always been lacking skills in the social niceties. Confrontation is like torture for me. But I should have put on big-girl panties and done it face-to-face like any decent person would have. There’s no excuse for me.

Do reminiscence and nostalgia fool us? I rue the days I once vowed to remember. They’re unwanted memories now. A mine sweeper? I need a mind sweeper. Why? Well, in my family the men came home at night.

A huge bright spot, smack-dab in the middle of my left temporal lobe, was impossible to miss. A small speck glimmered on my motor cortex. Some gray spots didn’t light up—those were the old ones. Yeah, I remember you.

For me to rate my present pain would require me to separate what I experience now from what I have experienced before. It’s not that I can’t do it. It’s just that it isn’t as simple as it seems.

How much pain on a scale of 1-10? Questions are raised.

Each evening after settling in bed, I glance at Zweig’s book and am reminded of my beloved grandmother. I reflect upon her difficult beginnings being orphaned at the age of eleven, and her subsequent immigrations. I think about how I credit her with my passions for writing and reading, after all, it was on her typewriter, where at the age of six, my first story emerged.

I pry the eyesore of a bird feeder off the deck, unblocking the impressive view of Lake Mendota. It’s a relief until I notice the sparrows swooping in for a feed, then veering off in confusion, realizing the feeder is gone. I feel like a traitor to his memory.

With those safety measures enacted, he created a profile on the now-defunct gay dating site Connexion and selected an intense, frowny photo of himself seated backwards in a chair in a very Cool Youth Pastor pose. ‘Sup? My name’s Eli. Let me rap at ya, he seemed to say.

Groups of laughing children pedaled by; joggers ran past me with their loud music. I was almost in a good mood when I reached Parque Revolución, passing people playing volleyball, hula hooping, and giving massages all on or just by the sidewalk.

Erna didn’t give me a football or a toy truck. She gave me a tea set meant for a little girl. At least 50 years have passed and I still remember how much I loved that present. And whatever my mother may have thought, she said nothing negative, nor did she take it away from me.

Returning home from an interview, in a suit that I buttoned myself into and let hang on my gaunt frame, I was faced with the prospect of being trapped in a temp-to-perm situation at a sketchy staffing firm. My roommates let me change before telling me more bad news. The landlords were raising the rent for all of the apartments in the building.

The fictional death of the play had morphed into real death, palpable and present. We all felt it. That weekend, Grim meandered around the dressing room, curious about our costumes, our make-up, our rituals. It picked things up, looked at them, put them back down. Smitten with my containers of fake blood, Grim grinned and licked its lips.

Against my closed eyelids I see us young and in love. We are riding off into the English countryside to our newlywed bed at a cozy B&B in the idyllic market town of Oundle, where a single road winds through old stone row houses and small local shops, about an hour from Cambridge University. Our cheeks are rosy, our eyes twinkling.

I just like to ride by the Summit Avenue rowhouse where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, his first novel, and ran out into the street to stop traffic and spread the news that Scribner’s had agreed to publish his book. Fitzgerald’s exuberance is now offset by a plaque mounted outside the rowhouse listing it as a National Historic Landmark but not saying why, a more modest, Minnesota-like approach for sure.