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Setting Right

Mary Dacton had reached a point where she no longer thought work could be anything better than drudgery. Her job as a copy editor—daily paper, mid-size market—was the one thing that had once given her satisfaction, especially the mundane triumphs of catching someone else’s error or winning an argument about punctuation. But over the years, the pleasure had drained out of her days as she corrected the same fundamental mistakes time after time. She used to hope she would be plucked out of her current place and elevated, but being passed over for copy chief three times, despite her experience, had taught her that hope was an illusion.

But that all changed one day when she got an email announcing, “Chance of a lif time!! We got gold watchs from MAJOR brands for NOTHING. Win friends and influence with a ROLEX or a GUCI. By one now and you could win a LUXURY Vacation.” [Read more…]

Parental Love

I’m squatting with my right knee angled to prop the fridge door open, a human doorstop. One hand holds an opened carton of milk, the cap now clamped under the pinky finger, which reduces my control over the half-gallon container as I raise it. The other hand has a harder task. The fingers wrap around the plastic body of my daughter’s bottle and two of them also pinch the rubber nipple, while the heel and the wrist have to maintain the right degree of pressure on the toddler’s shoulder to keep her from tumbling off my left thigh, which I’m holding flat like a bench for her. Of course, I can’t press too hard, or she’ll fall back off the other side. The fridge door kind of bounces off my knee. I tip the carton and pour the milk when everything is poised just so, like a galaxy that seems immobile while it spins in clean, self-perpetuating arcs. [Read more…]

True Things I Shouldn’t Have Said Anyway

KID: Why is Uncle Mike’s house so dusty?

WIFE: He’s getting older, sweetheart. We should see about getting him a housekeeper.

ME: Did you know the biggest component of dust is dead skin cells? We were pretty much breathing Uncle Mike’s old dermis the whole time.