WHAT IS A MAN?: REMEMBERING MY FATHER

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Culturally we’ve been pondering the question: What is a woman? Maybe it’s time to ask: What is a man?

My father — a bricklayer with eight kids — saw the world as a place of mystery and beauty, but that things could go so consistently, abysmally, wrong gnawed at him.

“Doesn’t that get my goat!” he’d rail in the parking lots of grocery stores, spotting a cart left by a careless shopper. “If that thing ever got rolling, it could pick up momentum, barrel right into a 3- or 4-year-old kid…” He shook his head, leaving us to imagine the twitching limbs, the tiny skull bleeding onto the asphalt.

What he was really thinking, I knew, was that the kid would have to be brought to the doctor — and doctors cost money.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.