The Happiest Days of Our Lives Read Online Free PDF

ago,” I said, as John Williams’ score began a reprise in my head.
    He turned around and back. “You had Jar-Jar twenty-five years ago?”
    “What?”
    I looked at the line of figures: Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and way down on the end, there was Jar-Jar Binks.
    A needle scratched across the imagined record. In my head, I thought of the worst curse word I could, and directed it at George Lucas.
    _______________
    * This story of th LaNdSPEEdR is call “The Trade” and can be found in Just A Geek .

exactly what i wanted
           My kids were 14 and 16 when this happened, which makes the fact that they were amused, rather than embarrassed, much more astonishing to me.
    A fter dinner, I was hit with a craving for some sort of frozen fruit, so I told Anne that I was going to run to the store and get myself some nice sorbet or something.
    “I have a coupon for Cold Stone,” she said. “Why don’t you take the kids and go there?”
    The nearest Cold Stone is in the mall, and it’s a bit of an ordeal to get there, park the car, walk across the whole place, deal with the inevitable mob of teenagers, blah blah blah get off my lawn, but when I was a kid and my dad took me for unannounced ice cream, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
    I walked into the living room and made the offer.
    The kids raced to the back of the house in a blur of tennis shoes and falling Wii remotes.
    “So that’s a ‘yes,’ I take it?” I said to the empty room.
    Several mini-ordeals later, we were at the counter. A teenage girl with a stud in her nose smiled at me and asked if I was ready.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’d like the raspberry sorbet.” I stopped myself before I could add the kind you’d buy in a secondhand store.
    “What size?” she asked.
    “Well,” I said, “I’d like you to pretend that I’m three years old, and give me an appropriately sized scoop.”
    Ryan, standing next to me, slowly shook his head. Nolan said nothing, but I saw his shoulders shake a bit as he suppressed a giggle.
    She scooped me a tiny little bit of sorbet, and held it up in a cup.
    “Is that good? Or would you like more?”
    It was a perfectly tiny scoop, exactly what I wanted.
    “That’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you!”
    She handed it to me, and I took a bite.
    “You’d better slow down there, Turbo,” Ryan said.
    “Yeah,” Nolan added. “You don’t want to race through your sorbet too fast.”
    I put my spoon back into my perfectly tiny scoop of baby-sized sorbet.
    “What?”
    Ryan burst out laughing.
    “Dude,” he said, “you drove all the way up here, parked all the way over on the other side of the mall so it’d be easier to find a space…”
    “…walked all the way through the mall,” Nolan added.
    “All so you could get, like, three bites of ice cream.” Ryan said.
    “Not ice cream,” I said. “Sorbet. Ice cream is too sweet.”
    Now it was Nolan’s turn to laugh. “Oh, I’m sorry. Sorbet .”
    I looked at the girl behind the counter. She was trying not to giggle, too.
    “Yes,” I said, “three bites of sorbet, and it’s exactly what I wanted.” I made a show of taking a tiny bite and dramatically savoring it. “Now are you going to order, or what?”
    Someday, when they’re parents, they may understand that it’s not about the ice cream, or the sorbet , or how much of it there is, or where we parked to find a space, as much as it’s all about taking my kids out on a Sunday night so we can all have a good-natured laugh at my expense.
    It was, in fact, exactly what I wanted.

close your eyes and then it’s past
           This essay is a collection of images, almost like flipping through a photo album, and though I thought it worked very well on my blog, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep it in the book. Every time we made a round of cuts, though, I’d look at this story and say, “Well, good night. Close your eyes…I shall have to kill you in the morning.”