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…

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. In doing so, I ended…

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…

How teaching English to farm workers in rural Michigan brought my parents together. — The latest in a series of essays inspired by the intersection of family photographs and memory. First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. This is the story, as my parents always told it: They were graduate students in linguistics at the University of Michigan. As part…

A 19th century-style ballgame and an iPhone app combine for a weekend trip back to the Civil War era. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. AVELLA, Pa. The scratchy old pictures of 19th-century baseball have always felt like time portals to me — smudgy windows into the early childhood of a game I love, almost but not quite real. They are at once familiar and utterly…

From the train window, other angles on life slip into focus. — First published in my Substack newsletter, Unsorted but Significant, August 2023. ABOARD THE AMTRAK PENNSYLVANIAN EAST OF PITTSBURGH The day is just beginning, and on this sunny Sunday morning all is still. Our train slices through the landscape in near silence, its rattling barely perceptible even to the sleepy travelers within its metal confines.