In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. 

Man with beer, artist unknown, c. 1920

My uncle Henry has killed a lot of people.

In spite of his dark past, and because of it, he’s my favorite American uncle. Since I cherish bilingually, in English and in Spanish, I cherish my uncles and my tíos separately. The border separates us, cleaving family from familia.

My favorite tío was Alvaro. Unlike Henry, he wasn’t a genius. He never killed anybody, though he was known to get rough with English. His favorite T-shirt was a little too tight and its stenciled letters declared LIFE’S A BEACH!

To visit Alvaro, I travel thousands of miles, to a cemetery in Guadalajara. To see Henry, I need only walk a mile from my apartment to a skilled nursing facility beside a hipster barbershop and an Irish pub.

Henry no longer speaks about the people he killed as an artillery officer, but decades ago, he often rambled about them to my father, his little brother. He shared specifics. He described GIs slicing free enemy ears, threading them together, crafting leis of shriveled lobes. He told about exploded water buffalo dripping from trees, pink rain. He talked about calling in an air strike and obliterating everyone and everything in a village, all life wiped out except for a single baby.

When Henry returned to California from Vietnam, the baby followed him. He continued to hear it crying. He looked for that baby everywhere, including underneath his mother’s house.

He couldn’t find it. Read More

In our column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. 

I was on an airplane last year, and the woman sitting in front of me was a real piece of work. She had two young kids who were totally fine, totally quiet, really low energy—but she kept trying to engage them and turn everything into a teachable moment.

She had a very loud, affected voice. I shit you not, this is a direct quote: “Asher, if you wish it, you may have one of your Laffy Taffys now, but then only two Laffy Taffys will remain.” How elegant! The kid didn’t respond, didn’t care either way, but she kept pushing them on him as if it were some kind of Stanford marshmallow experiment. Every time she said something, she repeated it (once more for the balcony!). Of course, she read to them, at top volume, from some Amelia Bedelia–style chapter book the whole flight, overarticulating like it was fucking Chaucer, nervously glancing from side to side to see if we noticed how good she was at this. Meanwhile, the kids tuned her out to play video games and eat wads of candy. When the plane was descending, she was like, “The flight to Manhattan is not all that long, if you recall the flight to London. Do you recall when we flew to London? That was a much longer flight than this, the flight into Heathrow. You may have another Laffy Taffy if you wish.” At that point, the guy across the aisle closed his eyes, exhaled, and said, very softly, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

That woman was a dipshit.

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In our new column One Word, writers expound on a single word. 

William Lindsay Windus, The Black Boy, 1844

I’ve worked a lot of jobs where I’ve dealt with boys. Lately, I’ve been teaching conjugation and sentence structure to junior high kids, swaths of whom are just flexing the boundaries of their boyhood. They ask a lot of questions.

One little dude, from Puerto Rico, wonders how many light bulbs there are in the building. One boy, another brown kid, asks me whether Houston will survive the inevitable floods brought about by global warming. And another boy, a little older, during an SAT excerpt featuring Anna Karenina, asks about the legality of queer marriage in Russia, before also asking whether I think he can hack into the building’s Wi-Fi, did I know that he can floss, do I listen to Gucci Mane, can I loan him some money for Fortnite.

They’re just boys. And that word—boy—is pretty interesting in itself: it embodies a phase of life and a physical state and a way of being. Boy is garçon. Boy is chico y niño. The distance between boy and man is elastic, and the word itself is just as flexible. Nearly every culture has some sort of ritual transition out of boyhood: bar mitzvahs for Jewish folks, cow jumping among the Hamar in Ethiopia, Seijin-no-Hi in Japan. A first gig. A first kiss. A first beer.

And the word’s weight adopts fluidity as it drifts from mouth to mouth: when my aunt calls me boy, in a sprawling patois, it’s not the same boy I’ve heard on fuck knows how many crowded street corners, at whatever ungodly hour. That boy comes after I’ve said something dumb or needlessly contentious or unspeakably obvious. Boy like, Really nigga? Boy like, Slow your roll. Boy like, Bruh; like, Fuck outta here; like, Your assertion is wildly improbable, but my acquiescence to your instigations are an integral part of our friendship’s contract.  Read More

In our new column One Word, writers expound on their favorite words. 

One kid raises their hand.

They ask, “Miss Gurba, why’d you become a high school teacher?”

This is a classic time-killing move.

My tone turns serious. I respond, “It was an accident.”

Hearing a public school employee be so blunt widens kids’ eyes.

They’ve baited me into a tacit game of truth or dare and I’ve knowingly broken the rules. I’m pretty sure they expect me to belt out the opening lyrics of “Greatest Love of All.” They want a saint.

What garbage. Catholics raised me, but I’m not a martyr. Still, even teenagers know you’re not supposed to admit that you stumbled into their classroom, but who cares? I did and I stayed and I continue to stumble in every morning.

Something my students ask me less often is whether or not I like teaching.

Something they ask me even less often than that is what I like about my profession.  Read More