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Beyond the Blinking Eye of Righteousness
Hats off, slide the chair, hold the door. Robert Barsanti reflects on traditional gender roles, and how, in the end, a man does what needs to be done. This summer, my youngest son and I spent a good...
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Learning to Fail
Robert Barsanti gives a rallying call for failure. Why? Victory reinforces; failure teaches. I teach with a woman who loves her seniors. She praises them, challenges them to be better, and, when...
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The Night Is Full of Bicycles
Neil Allen Smith died on September 18, 2010. He was biking back to his mobile home in Tampa from his dishwashing job at the Crab Shack. Somewhere along the highway, a white car swerved and clipped...
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Watching Time Pass Over the Vineyard Game
You can’t buy Christmas spirit, but you can make it. — On Nantucket, the holiday season begins with the Vineyard game. Sometime during the game, the great gray lid of winter fastens itself over the...
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Lanyards For Tourniquets
In our age of terrorism, we have become a nation of lifeguards. When tragedy hits, Americans have learned to open their doors instead of closing them. — ‘‘We started grabbing tourniquets and started...
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School in the Time of Dinosaurs
Teacher Robert Barsanti looks at education, its metrics and the point they’re both missing. — Last week, I saw the new report cards that many schools are sending out. It was a four-page booklet, where...
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The Value of Snow Shoveling
When Bob Barsanti was his eldest son’s age, his adolescent ego was stoked by shoveling snow. That was then… An hour or so after the final snowflake fell and twenty minutes after the plows heaped snow at...
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Willy Loman Plugged the John
When the plumbing backs up, men often expect that we should know how to make the repair. Recently, I have had a frozen pipe. The wind snuck in under the house, infected an exposed sewer pipe, and...
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Prizefighters and Poppas
What does the life deliberately and well lived look like? I passed New Year’s Eve in the dark on a wet road in Vermont. The sky hung low and starless overhead, the snow and ice dripped from the roofs,...
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Gun Dreams
In our fantasies, a gun ends all arguments in our favor. When I was nineteen years old, I took a job as a prison guard in the Middlesex County House of Correction. At that time, the prison was an old...
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Drinking Wine with Noah
“I piled up his clothes, vacuumed his floor, and got rid of the flotsam and jetsam of an unclicked mind.” Robert Barsanti takes his father to the hospital. In my father’s refrigerator, I found: a box...
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The Dream of Fondue
Emerson wrote that a hero is no braver than any other man, but he is braver five minutes longer. Robert Barsanti suspects it is the same with successful marriages. On her first trip to Europe, and on...
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The Grasshopper Life
To his old girlfriends, Robert Barsanti’s father would always be Romeo. But for Robert, Benito was Lear. This morning, my father, Benito, celebrated his two thousandth birthday. He had booked the...
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Eat the Cake
Robert Barsanti wishes he had eaten more cake, kissed more women, and seen Sarah Vaughn when he had the chance. I bottomed out on 495. I was staring a down the barrel of a divorce and was ducking for...
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A Very Old Man With Enormous Skis
Robert Barsanti reflects on his father, the skier. “Every other role was a costume he wore in order to get into the car and drive north to snow and slopes.” I stood at the base of the teaching area at...
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The Irish Goodbye
Fifteen years after her death, Robert Barsanti’s mother still helps him through difficult times ‘with the whisper of iron and the strength of bone.’ My mother died alone in hospital room on a quiet...
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Drinking Wine With Noah
As Robert Barsanti cleaned out his hospice-bound father’s junk-ridden apartment, he gave this final toast to the old man. In my father’s refrigerator, I found these things: a box of Hot Pockets; a box...
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How It Might Have Been
Robert Barsanti imagined that his marriage would be better than his parents’. It took a divorce for him to see how lucky they were. On her first trip to Europe, on her first night, my mother bought a...
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The Grind
As a school-dance chaperone, Robert Barsanti spends the evening kicking out the hump-happy Swayze wannabes and their dates. His secret? He was more like them than he’d like to admit. At the Autumn...
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Season of the Racecar Tent
If your future self gave you a call this season, what would he say? Carpe diem—and don’t let tourists ruin the holidays. Two years ago, my oldest boy figured out that Christmas meant presents. When he...
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