Calypso

by David Sedaris

No one had a houseful of servants or a trained proboscis monkey, yet we’d turned out OK, hadn’t we?

It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.” Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit.

Who would have thought, when we were children, that the three of us would wind up here, in Japan of all places, dressed so expensively like mental patients and getting along so well together?

“I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.

I cock my head and look at them with an expression that translates to Why is stuff coming from that hole in your face?

Take that, assholes.

Doing something nice for him was easy and immediate and didn’t lead to the mountain of junk mail you’re punished with whenever you give to an established charity.

It’s the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It’s almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

A person could live handsomely on the money we waste over the course of a given year, and here’s our father wandering from room to room with a flashlight.

“He’s just late for death, the way he’s been late for everything else all his life.”