This is how you find your son who was hitchhiking home for spring break to surprise you and now he calls you because he and two friends are stranded in a deserted place called Pine Island and it’s getting dark.

"Oh, please. You're Andy Warhol. Let's have dinner, okay?"

Growing up I thumbed through the pictures often, trying to understand where their love went wrong. Now I wanted to know what they’d done right.

She dressed all in black, always wearing shitkicker boots with high, thick heels.

Black and white: I can’t imagine the life of Vera Frankel, before my birth, with color.

  Your most fundamental drives are stitched into the fabric of your neural circuitry, and they are inaccessible to you. You find certain things more attractive than others, and you don’t know why. – David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain     At least the African was an excuse to get out of the house, like a trip to Staples for a bargain box of correction tape.

“Thank God for birth control!”

...many residents were on welfare, didn’t vote, and lived in tiny brick row houses...

...the thwack of rubber bands and the pounding of feet on the steps.

Do not expect the arrival of a canned ham or nylons.