Boyhood Empire

My tiff with Pussy Galore and Mrs. Conte came not long after Samantha’s tomboy reassurances had seemed to defang the advance of female trouble. [...]

Though my mother was gone and my switchboard heartbreak was still raw, home remained a sweet place, mostly because its nooks, crannies, and trees [...]

As a lover of old magazines and illustrated books, I found subjects of interest my father never discussed. In a nutshell, I fell in [...]

To get to New York we retraced our off-to-Spain steps of four years before. Only this time, without my mother present, we were allowed [...]

My much-anticipated VC-10 adventure did not go quite as planned, and yet again, it was my father’s uncanny sense of my mood that had [...]

If books end, so do phases of life, though they refuse to stop blending, one with another. The London excursion to see Mr. Foyle, [...]

There is no knowing why they picked that house, little more than a shy yellow cottage recessed from Wilmington Avenue — not an avenue [...]

To get to the little yellow cottage by the big Atlantic sea required a bus that made many stops and was operated by a [...]

Our yellow cottage was possessive of its rooms. It had but three: a large bedroom, a smaller one, a cupboard-sized study, as well as [...]

Beach life came with pleasures and admonishments, the latter (including the widespread failure to venerate my castle projects) I simply disregard — in exchange [...]

In June of 1959 my favorite beach car was made by a company called Nash. I came upon my favorite Nash, vintage 1947, parked [...]

The place where the boardwalk ended, a carpet of stitched-together matchsticks surrendering to endless, disinterred sand, seemed to me like the end of the [...]