Excerpt: Nobody's Son

The following is from Mark Slouka’s memoir, Nobody's Son . Slouka is the author of six books. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories as well as for the PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, and his essays have appeared three times for Best American Essays. His collection Essays from the Nick of Time, received the PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

"In the summer of 1970, when I was twelve years old, my mother and father and I spent three months in a big wooden house on the shore of one of the Twin Lakes in the northwestern corner of Connecticut. My father, a professor of political science, had gotten a summer teaching gig at some institute of international something-or-other. It came with a house, so up we went.
There may be more beautiful places on earth than northwestern Connecticut in the summer, but if there are, I haven’t seen them yet. I remember that house, that place – the creaky wooden steps, the well-balanced cedar doors, the click of the tongue in the latch. I remember the track of moonlight across the lake, the days of rain hissing in the long grass at noon. I fell in love that summer. Her name was Karen. Karen had long blond hair and, if memory serves, ever-so-slightly crossed eyes, and I loved her. How she felt about me didn’t really come up. Bread’s “I Wanna Make it With You” was on the radio that summer, as was Freida Payne’s “Band of Gold.” Those songs were about us. Every song was about us."

Read more here