The Best of Me

by David Sedaris

A person in a wheelchair often feels invisible. Push a wheelchair and you’re invisible as well. Outside of the dorm, the only people to address us would speak as if we were deaf, kneeling beside the chair to shout, “FATHER TONY IS HAVING A GUITAR MASS THIS SUNDAY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO JOIN US?” Peg would beckon the speaker close and whisper, “I collect the teeth from live kittens and use them to make necklaces for Satan.” “WELL SURE YOU DO,” they’d say. “THAT’S WHAT OUR FELLOWSHIP IS ALL ABOUT.”

“Bitch, I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.”

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

“Do you think it was my fault that she drank?” my father asked not long ago. 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.

As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “you won” as in “you won the game of life,” or “you won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.