When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,26

like arrows into the bosoms of power and finance, but I was not one of them. My path was a winding one, with plenty of obstacles along the way. When school was finished, I went back home, an Ivy League graduate with four years’ worth of dirty laundry and his whole life ahead of him. “What are you going to do now?” my parents asked.

And I said, “Well, I was thinking of washing some of these underpants.”

That took six months. Then I moved on to the shirts.

“Now what?” my parents asked.

And when I told them I didn’t know, they lost what little patience they had left. “What kind of a community-college answer is that?” my mother said. “You went to the best school there is. How can you not know something?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

In time my father stopped wearing his Princeton gear. My mother stopped talking about my “potential,” and she and my dad got themselves a brown and white puppy. In terms of intelligence, it was just average, but they couldn’t see that at all. “Aren’t you just the smartest dog in the world?” they’d ask, and the puppy would lick their fingers in a way that was disturbingly familiar.

My first alumni weekend cheered me up a bit. It was nice to know that I wasn’t the only unemployed graduate in the world, but the warm feeling evaporated when I got back home and saw that my parents had given the dog my bedroom. Above the dresser, in place of the Princeton pennant they’d bought me for my first birthday, was a banner reading “Westminster or Bust.”

I could see which way the wind was blowing, and so I left and moved to the city, where a former classmate, a philosophy major, got me a job on his ragpicking crew. When the industry moved overseas — the doing of another former classmate — I stayed put and eventually found work skinning hides for a rat catcher, a thin, serious man with the longest beard I had ever seen.

At night, I read and reread the handful of books I’d taken with me when I left home, and eventually, out of boredom as much as anything else, I started to write myself. It wasn’t much, at first: character sketches, accounts of my day, parodies of articles in the alumni newsletter. Then, in time, I became more ambitious and began crafting little stories about my family. I read one of them out loud to the rat catcher, who’d never laughed at anything, but roared at the description of my mother and her puppy. “My mom was just the same,” he said. “I graduated from Brown, and two weeks later she was raising falcons on my top bunk!” The story about my dad defecating in his neighbor’s well pleased my boss so much that he asked for a copy and sent it to his own father.

This gave me the confidence to continue, and in time I completed an entire book, which was subsequently published. I presented a first edition to my parents, who started with the story about our neighbor’s well, and then got up to close the drapes. Fifty pages later, they were boarding up the door and looking for ways to disguise themselves.

Other people had loved my writing, but these two didn’t get it at all. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

My father adjusted his makeshift turban and sketched a mustache on my mother’s upper lip. “What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong: you’re killing us.”

“But I thought that’s what you wanted?”

“We did,” my mother wept, “but not this way.”

It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life’s work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

That’s Amore

Beside our apartment building in New York, there was a narrow gangway, and every evening, just after dark, rats would emerge from it and flock to the trash cans lining the curb. The first time I saw them, I started and screamed, but after that I made it a point to walk on the other side of the street, pausing and squinting to take them all in. It was like moving to Alaska and seeing a congregation of bears — I knew to expect them, but still I could never quite believe my eyes. Every now and then, one of them would get flattened by a cab, and