Days of the Locust

One of my father’s favorite sayings was “There are no heroes.” But I think it depends on how you define “hero.” Indeed, he himself received the conventional recognition of a hero: a Purple Heart. I’m a decent person. I’ll do the right thing if I have the time and information to figure out what the right thing is. But I’m indecisive, no good in a crisis, often have to reverse an initial flawed impulse.  I wish I had the precise lightning reflexes of Wes Autrey.  In 2007, 50-year-old Autrey dived onto the subway tracks in the face of an oncoming train and pressed his body to pin down a young man who had fallen into the track bed and was having a seizure. The train rolled over them so close it left a grease smudge on Autrey’s knit cap. Afterward, Autrey was modest. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular. I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right,” he said. “Since I do construction work with Local 79, we work in confined spaces a lot. So I looke...

Visits to my frail, demented mother are like wars: interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror. No idea what to do about the moments of terror, but I’ve been working on the interminable boredom.  When my father was alive, he and my mother spent whole days lying on the foldout futon couch that became their 24-hour bed: sleeping, watching television, reading the paper. If my father got off the futon to prepare a meal or collect the mail or pay a bill or make a phone call, my mother would erupt in a fury. “What’s he doing!” she would fume as though he had betrayed her, and she wouldn’t always forgive him when he returned. My mother, the forthright feminist who railed against dependence, struggles with an abject fear of abandonment. So these past three years, since my father’s death in 2014—the ultimate abandonment—I try to give my mother the gift of companionship, even though I live 3,000 miles away. I call her on the phone almost daily and visit her for a week every two ...

Boy: Water is a boy. Father: No, it isn't. Water is a liquid. It isn't a boy or a girl. Boy: Yes it is. It's a boy. My teacher said so.