I have a friend I'll call Patrick who lives in Tucson, the small southern Arizona town where I spent 14 years of my childhood. A six-four wall of a man, softened in parts by pints and whiskey, Patrick and I have been close since high school, when his family–a big, pasty, Irish affair–moved to town from Phoenix. Once, on a trip to a low-budget Mexican beach community named Rocky Point, Patrick and I conspired to eat our vegan friend's entire supply of peanut butter and jelly while he was in the shower, leaving only his toothbrush in an empty jar of Skippy. While he screamed, "Do you know how hard [...]

When my German-American mother married my black-American Indian father, her dad and stepmom disowned her immediately. They would have been upset had she married an Irishman–"Those people kiss the filthy Blarney Stone," my grandfather would say–but a dark man was practically incomprehensible, like marrying an ironing board. "Race-mixing," as my grandfather called it, was an abomination.

The last thing my mom remembers her dad saying as she walked out of his modest Akron home is, "I never want you in our lives again."