Show Essay

I’m opening for David Sedaris next month and very excited about it. I’m buried in the editing process for a new piece and so I thought I’d share a piece I wrote a couple of summers ago which I opened with in the fall of 2023.

Still July

This year, my summer began with travel for work, taking me out of town for most of June between a paperback book tour and then teaching at a ten day MFA residency and by the time I was home, Atlas seemed like a thirty year old, our house his bachelor pad. I had one free day during my residency and I drove from Boston to New Haven to see him mid-week. It was long enough for him to ask me to order a t-shirt with cartoon tomatoes and the phrase “legalize marinara” and to show me Tik Tok videos of some guy named Liver King who only ate trays of raw meat.

“Watch this,” Atlas said, showing me his phone. “Liver King catches a fish with his bare hands.”

When I was finally home for good, I woke up and heard him making a snack at three in the morning and I met him in the kitchen where he was sitting on the countertop.

“You want some of this?” he said.

This being flaming hot Cheetos and room temperature coffee leftover from a pot he’d made twelve hours earlier.

It’s been a strange summer, with no big vacation scheduled, just random small trips, me teaching on zoom a lot, and Atlas too young to get a job.

I started running this summer and did too much too quickly, causing the kind of pain in my knees that made me limp and consume ibuprofen around the clock. Trying to at least get a little exercise in the sunshine while I was taking a break from running, I went outside to do yard work. I didn’t notice my nosey neighbor, Anita, watching me from her porch.

She immediately crossed the street to come over to talk to me. I ripped out weeds aggressively and braced myself.

“I saw your husband’s car in your driveway last night but I haven’t seen it in I don’t know how long before that.”

“Okay,” I said.

My husband moved out last year but sometimes he still comes over.

“Has he been sick?” Anita asked, maybe hoping to bring some gossip with her to the senior daycare center. This is a woman who watches my house and runs over to retrieve any packages left at the side door, carrying them around to the back door, staring through the window and knocking with my delivery in her arms like a hostage until I open the door and talk to her.

I told her I had to weed the other side of my yard and walked away.

As soon as I started to work near the fence, I accidentally disturbed a bee hive I hadn’t noticed and was quickly swarmed. One flew up my shirt. A couple landed in my hair and stung my scalp. As I hobbled toward my garage as fast as my injured knees could carry me, swatting and slapping myself, I saw Anita smugly watching me from her yard, her arms crossed over her chest, as if she was sure the universe was wagging a finger at me and announcing, “That’s what you get! You’re rude to the elderly.”

My son and I were free floating through summer, meeting up in the kitchen throughout our unstructured days.

“Is it still July?” he asked. “And hey, can I have band practice here tomorrow?”

I teach memoir writing on zoom and the next night, my Tuesday class started just as the band members arrived and set up in my basement. I forgot about my class when I’d said yes, but there was a whole floor between us so I closed my office door and hoped for the best. Then I remembered that Atlas had said they were planning on doing a cover of a death metal song called “Hammer Smashed Face.”

“Let’s talk about sentiment vs. sentimentality in this piece,” I said to my zoom students. “What do we think? Anyone?”

And then, the growl rising up from the bowels of my house:

Lifeless body, slouching dead/ Lecherous abscess where you once had a head

Even my student who spends every class in a vape cloud waved the fog away to blink wide-eyed into the screen at me.

In previous summers, Atlas and I had gone to Rhode Island and one year, he went to camp. I asked him if those summers had been better.

“Camp was pretty cool,” he said. He’d been ten that year and it was a wilderness camp. “We built forts and my group had a pawn shop.”

“What did you sell?”

“All the stuff we took from the other group,” he said.

All I remembered from that year was how hot it was the week he’d gone to camp. He’d get in the air-conditioned car at the end of the day, filthy, sweaty, and silent. I thought it was just the heat and had no idea he was exhausted from stealing all afternoon.

One evening last week, we met in the kitchen and Atlas said, “Imagine being a bull? Being so sensitive and snowflakey that you can’t even handle a red shirt?”

I found him standing in front of the refrigerator one morning and he said, “It’s still July, right? I’d like to have a brain tumor if I could wake up speaking in a Scottish accent. Some tumors cause that.”

He came into the kitchen when I was making tea and said, “I just watched a Tik Tok video of a guy drinking garbage juice.”

When I can’t sleep at night, I think about how I only have three more summers before my son goes to college. How is that possible.

“It’s still July,” I said one day. “Listen, if I ever get Alzheimers, can you just get me one of those realistic baby dolls and I’ll live out the rest of my days in the bliss of delusional new motherhood.”

He will leave before I know it. The way a human being changes every single year on the long march to adulthood, going through radical phases and interests, should prepare a parent for that day when they move out and yet somehow, I already know the devastation that awaits me. A day will come when I will stand in my kitchen on a warm hazy summer day, shocked by the absolute silence. I’ll close my eyes and imagine enough noise in the basement to keep the neighbors away. But by then, maybe I’ll be in a nursing home, trapped in his babyhood, dreaming of the teenager, the young man, he will grow into, picturing a lifetime of summer days still to come.

Thank you so much for reading.