The Best of Me

by David Sedaris

It wasn’t seismic, like an earthquake, but more like a medium-size boulder that had shifted a little.

It used to be that you’d write a letter of complaint, then read it over, wondering, Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent stamp? With the advent of email, complaining became free.

it was the color of Vaseline, an uncolor really,

My sisters and I didn’t want to understand Mrs. Peacock. We just wanted to hate her,

This was just the way they spoke, the verbal equivalent of their everyday china. Among company, the wife might remark that she felt a slight chill, but here that translated to “I am fucking freezing.”

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

The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.