Calypso

by David Sedaris

“I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.

I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting.

I was surprised when a woman I’d very much enjoyed talking to described me as “bonsai-size.”

Janine was the type who’d likely blame herself for getting mugged. “It’s what I get for having anything worth taking!”

“Why don’t you invite Jeff to dinner?” I remember her asking Gretchen one night in the late seventies. “Because we broke up a month ago and I’ve been in my room crying ever since?” “Well, he still needs to eat,” my mother said.

It’s not that our father waited till this late in the game to win our hearts. It’s that he’s succeeding.

Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.

Should you wander into a shop during your visit to the United States, you can expect a clerk to ask, “So what are we up to today?” “We,” as if the two of you had made plans you forgot about.

The deal with America is that it’s always something.

“Something that’s going to eat a tumor probably won’t distinguish between a good one and a bad one.”

I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted none of us to act on it.

The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married. To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden.

I once knew someone in New York who insisted that his black Lab was a vegetarian. “Just like you,” I said. “Gosh, what a coincidence!” When the dog charged after a hamburger someone had dropped on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue, he was, I guess, just going after the pickle.

My goal on this beach trip was to find the snapping turtle I’d befriended the previous summer and feed him the lipoma I’d had cut out of me in El Paso.

another r no context quote

You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.

“You have to work on yourself after you’re dead?” I asked. It seemed a bit much, like having to continue a diet or your participation in AA.