Sometimes breakfast in bed is not what it seems.

For an old guy, Professor Chauncy Gregor could be quite agile. Remarkably so, thought Alisha, as she struggled to keep at least one of the old, oddly-stained Edwardian club chairs between herself and her dissertation adviser.

Of course it’s all liquefied concrete and particlized metal now, but the air still felt the same, heavy on the skin, slightly gritty with salt. It’s warmer now, slightly confusing, even though the GPS said I was in the right place. I saw you there, propped on the rickety chair, the breeze blowing the curls across your eyes, the lamp lights creating those shadows that always make me think of our first date where the flickering of the candles made me fall in love with you.

Ali’s mother was famous for her bread. Every morning, by five, those fortunate enough to live near could smell the day’s first loaves. The sweet - almost nauseatingly saccharine - smell of night jasmine gave way to one of humanity’s oldest and most revered experiences. You couldn’t buy a house anywhere in the West Bank then, but if you could have, property values around her house would’ve been sky-high.

My son was only seven when - after tee-ball practice, but before young explorers - we broke all existing precedent as I recklessly turned left at Hiawatha instead of right. I glanced into the rear view mirror and saw my boy staring at me in uncomprehending shock. To the right was Chuck E. Cheese, long the destination of tee-ball champions. My boy knew that Chuck himself was from New Jersey, that he liked skateboarding and that Chuck’s favorite pizza was the same as his - extra cheese. They went way back, my boy and Chuck. And, based on the look in my boy’s eyes, it was all coming horribly undone.

The mortar slammed into the muck next to us. It didn’t blow; it just stood there, impaled to its waist in the mud. The three of us - me, Rog, and Killa’ Kenny - just stared, like a cartoon with our mouths hangin’ open, our eyes shifting to either side in our unmovin’ heads trying to see one another. I remember Kenny say’n, “well, fuck me with a toadstool”, or some thin’ similar. Kenny always had some dumb-ass sayin’ or ‘nother. Benefit, I guess, of growin’ up Southern.

The stained piece of copy paper, taped on three corners to the dirty - or at least no longer white - linoleum wall, proclaimed in red magic marker: Happy Pancake - $2 two Dollars!!

Sometimes, when the wind was just right, I could hear the warbling sing-song of the ice cream truck. I constructed elaborate fantasies around that sound.

My family had a lot of traditions. Which was interesting because we never spoke of the past at all. It wasn’t that we were forbidden, it just didn’t happen. Sure, when me and Jimmy were smaller we’d ask all sorts of questions. Sometimes we got answers, sometimes we got answers that were different than the answers to the same questions asked earlier, and some times we got no answer. But we did have our traditions. Our memories of them became our family memories.

It turns out that spaghetti sauce and blood share more than color and a certain viscosity; they’re both devilishly hard to remove if left on the wall over night. When, a month ago, in a terrorized frenzy, I’d knocked the pot of Bolognese off the burner, across the counter and into the wall, I made the decision then that it was more important to be at Aaron’s side than stopping to clean things up.