“Watching your parents age is a weird thing. When you’re a kid they’re aging, but you live with them so you see it every day in increments too small to notice. But then you grow up, maybe leave home, and months pass between visits and you start to notice things: gray hairs that weren’t there before, wrinkles that have set in around their eyes, new habits that have formed. “

“I don’t remember too much about my first business trip, but I do remember making a fool out of myself, twice. Once in a funny kind of way that actually earned me some points as the cool new chick who could hang with the boys, and once in a, “what the hell were you thinking you naive child?” kind of way that did just the opposite.”

“They’ve unleashed my inner Brooklyn,” my mom yelled, knuckles white around the steering wheel of her car as we chased a van down Centennial Avenue, a sleepy neighborhood street whose only usual commotion was caused by the peacocks escaping from their enclosure on the corner lot.