Toward the end of his life, my father owned many pieces of clothing. This was definitely not one of them. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. It WASN’T AN UGLY SWEATER. Not really. I mean, it wasn’t attractive, and it was pretty generic. But I wouldn’t call it ugly. One day it just showed up. I’d gone over to my parents’ assisted-living facility north of…

The curious, tobacco-inflected correspondence between my adolescent grandfather and Mark Twain. First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, March 2023. I never knew my paternal grandfather and namesake, Edward Mason Anthony Sr., who died a decade and a half before I was born. I can’t remember my grandmother…

A 20-year detour is long enough. — PITTSBURGH, Pa., 9/11/21 It is 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2021, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I am driving my 18-year-old son down from our home in the northern suburbs to the University of Pittsburgh campus, to a dorm not far from the elementary school that we both attended. …

Aging, death and the lies of 1980s bubblegum music. — “Welcome to your life. There’s no turning back.” — Tears for Fears, 1985 For Chris Wenzler (1967–2020). ALLISON PARK, Pa. Me, right now: standing in the front bathroom of the split-level house passed to me by my parents a decade ago. I glance in the mirror where, each weekday morning between 1982 and…

An old ornament emerges from a box with a story in many tongues. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, in December 2023. THERE ARE BOTH BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES to living in the house where you grew up, surrounded by the ballast and possibility of more than a half-century of multigenerational knick-knackery. …

I already knew there was no Santa. Then something challenged my abiding belief in disbelief. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, in December 2023. MY PARENTS were university professors. When I was little, I went to a lot of gatherings of university professors. …

A rejoinder. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, December 2023. THE ADMITTEDLY JARRING SELFIE above reminds me, if I do say so myself, of a still from a Wes Anderson film. It captures my feet, my mom’s coffin and her open grave on the frigid early afternoon of Dec…

After 58 years, the era of the newspaper ends at our house. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, November 2023. YESTERDAY MORNING, I padded out to the edge of our driveway in suburban Pittsburgh on a crisp, sunny fall Sunday to retrieve a thin blue plastic bag and scurry back inside in my socks. …

The tiny things we choose to remember can echo forward for decades. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, earlier this month. MY PARENTS WERE both committed users of index cards — or just “3x5 cards,” as they called them. My father carried tiny reams of them around in his shirt pocket, blank and bound with rubberbands, and occasionally even…