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This week: A grandfather explains things that no longer exist to his grandson.
Weekly Featured Essay
Rocket 88
by Sydney Lea
A few weeks ago, one of our grandsons, nine years old, stepped away from the clamor of a family gathering and walked straight up to me. His preoccupied look told me something was on his mind. I bent to listen, the power of my two hearing aids not a match for the collective chatter. He was asking me a question, but uncertain I’d gotten it rightly, I told him to repeat it. “Grandpa, what’s an Oldsmobile?”
I simply answered that an Oldsmobile was a car that’s not produced anymore. I immediately wondered why the question had occurred to the boy in the first place but before I could ask, he rushed back to be with his little brother and cousins. Distracted myself by plenteous, beloved company, I didn’t get around to pursuing the matter that afternoon.
Then suddenly everyone was gone.
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2025 Pushcart Nominees
We’re pleased to announce our nominees for this year’s Pushcart Prize: Elizabeth Bird (left) for “On Love, War, and Loss: A Life in Three Acts” and Lee Jeffers Brami (right) for “My Grandmother’s Secret“.
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FedEx: When You Absolutely, Positively Need That Third Job
by Patrick D. Hahn
Sparrows Point, Maryland, late summer, mid-afternoon. This area once was the home of Bethlehem Steel, but its glory days as a manufacturing powerhouse are long gone. Now it serves as a hub for the distribution of products made somewhere else.
The sun is shining brilliantly outside. Today would be a perfect day for young lovers to go strolling hand in hand along the beach, through the park, or along the Harborplace, but none of that is in the cards for me. I’ve just gotten off my other job (well, one of my two other jobs) as a college lecturer, and now I’m reporting for work at FedEx Ground.
After more than thirty years of teaching undergraduate courses in biology (like most of us doing the actual work of teaching), I still am employed on a part-time, short-term basis, with contracts stipulating I can be gotten rid of at any time, for any reason. (Actually, most of us “part-timers” teach more than the “full-timers,” but never mind that for now.) This is a scam of which the students are almost completely unaware. Sweatshop conditions for the teachers, crushing student loan debt for the students—this has become part of the new normal. And this explains my never-ending search for side jobs that work around my teaching responsibilities.
The Gymnast
by Mark Lucius
The night was made for boredom, but boredom would not prevail. We three high school seniors, nary a wise man among us, traveled to a neighboring school fifteen miles from our southeastern Wisconsin town—looking to fill an empty Friday night in February 1970.
Another Friday, we might have watched basketball, gone to a party, played a few hours of poker with friends. Something we liked better. But all that February night offered was a wrestling meet away from home. A classmate excelled at the sport, so we went to cheer him on. He won, the meet ended, and we left the brightly lit gymnasium for home.
None of us could have guessed that soon, we’d be gambling with our lives.
Attempting Fate
by Adam Perry
In Sophocles’ The Oedipus Trilogy, the blind prophet Tiresias rocks the worlds of powerful men with visions of the future that warn of the dangers of false pride (what the Greeks called “hubris”). Tiresias’ cameos in the plays of Sophocles are amongst the first instances where the metaphoric connection between blindness and truth was put to paper and allegorized on stage. That metaphor has been explored so often in literature, theatre, film, art, and any number of bad sketch comedy skits throughout history that it deserves its own emoji. Tiresias is also a transgender pioneer of sorts in Greek mythology after spending a few years being transformed into a woman by the Gods for the dastardly deed of whacking a couple of mating snakes with his ancient Greek mobility cane (otherwise known as a stick). I am sure there are any number of deeply researched academic treatises earnestly penned by genders studies experts that interpret what the heck was up with old blind Tiresias going from man to woman and then back to man again after making amends with the amorous snakes. I will spare you my uninformed perspective on that front. As a dude who is going blind, I am naturally more drawn to pontificate on Tiresias’ spot as the “OG” of bad ass blind folks.
Not Built for Children
by Garima Chhikara
It’s one thing not to want something; another to be denied it. I never wanted children. I find them manipulative, burdensome, and annoyingly loud. And, to be fair, so was I until at least twenty-six. The very parts I despise in them are the same ones I’ve been trying to prune out of myself. People romanticize childhood innocence and treat kids like gods just because the world hasn’t touched them yet. But that’s not purity. It’s just inexperience.
Still, I felt something like sadness. A loss I couldn’t quite understand or accept when the doctor told me my chances of bearing a child were very slim.
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