Sting-Ray Afternoons Quotes

“A fourth-grader with a red-tipped Lucky Spike dangling from his lip and a die-cast metal cap gun tucked into the waistband of his Toughskins, riding through South Brook on a Sting-Ray the color of grape soda, was an adolescent American badass circa 1974 - especially if he had a temporary tattoo from a Cracker Jack box adhered to one or both of his pipe-cleaner biceps.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“I am named after the saint who was stoned to death rather than the one who was tortured and beheaded. Reading my ‘Children’s Book of Saints,’ I think of this as a small blessing.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In the spring of 1973, when I was six, researchers at the University of Chicago reported that “young school children at play are similar in a number of ways to young baboons or monkeys,” a fact any boy could have told them.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“At home, while Dad is away, Jim beats up Tom, Tom beats up me, and sometimes Jim skips the middleman and beats me up directly.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Dad has impressed on each of his children that we’re no better than anybody else and are often a great deal worse.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“The Sears Christmas Wish Book, thick as a telephone directory, was more than a catalogue of consumer goods. It was a glossy catalogue of children’s dreams, a hard-copy rendering of an eight-year-old’s id.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In dying, she allayed my greatest fear -- of death. Dying joined shoe tying and coat zipping and bed making on the long list of acts Mom demonstrated for her children, so that we could someday do it for ourselves.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“In those days, tired of buying him tennis balls and socks and Old Spice for his birthday, we annually asked Dad if there wasn’t anything else he would like. And he always said the same thing. He gathered us to his side—Amy and The Boys; one redhead and four shitheads—and told us that he already had everything he ever wanted. The car is just a box to keep it in.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death. But sometimes it is.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father’s Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“There is no such thing as a carefree childhood, only a childhood that shifts the burden of care onto someone else. [Mom] is that someone else.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Madman Muntz was a wildly successful automobile salesman who had pioneered the loud television hard sell to move cars off his lot.”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“Between screams, Mom managed to cover the snake with a bucket, which she duct-taped to the floor, so that when Dad came home from work eight hours later in a suit and tie he found, in the dark, an enraged reptile—coiled and claustrophobic—waiting to strike. He just managed to slide a copy of the REO Speedwagon album You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons

“There is an irresistible impulse among the boys of suburban Minneapolis to kick a football as far as they possibly can. Even among the men. Mike McCollow’s dad will come home from his dental practice, having stopped at the VFW hall for a brandy Manhattan en route, and drop-kick a half-frozen football between the uprights of two barren tree branches without even setting down his briefcase”
― Steve Rushin, Sting-Ray Afternoons