My brother Jim called to tell me he was about to bid on a 50-acre island in the middle of the Illinois River.

“We want to scale down,” he said. “Do the Thoreau thing. You know—Walden Pond.”

I wrote seven feature length screenplays between the ages of twelve and seventeen. That’s one per year plus an extra one junior year when I got too stoned by myself for the first time. None of these screenplays were ever produced because I both was underage and undertalented (that’s untalented with an extra der). I list them here so my sister’s future children shall be able to see how much cooler their uncle could have been than them.

As a child one rarely questions religious beliefs. Your parents tell you what to believe and that’s that. My father was never the religious type, but would occasionally be found to utter a short prayer whenever convenient for him. My mother, however, adhered fairly strictly to the Islamic tradition and made the effort to pray as much as possible. Namaz, she called it. The incongruity between my father’s more lax perspective and my mother’s incessant incantations really made me wonder. Did God want to be constantly bothered with the insignificant events of our daily lives or was He more into the gestalt? What if God really was a micromanager? Would someone like my dad end up getting the cold shoulder because of his inconsistent appeals?

It had not been a good Christmas Eve for the Nyhus family. It started off all wrong when Eric arrived late donning a new girl on his arm, a woman the family had no idea even existed, let alone would be joining them for the evening. Her name was Eden, and while friendly enough, she wore so many fake gold bangles on her arm that it caused a racket while taking communion at First Lutheran that night.

Mr. Stevenson must have had a first name, but, if so, his teachers didn’t know it. “Is that so, Stevenson?” they inquired. “Speak up, Stevenson, so that the whole class can hear you.” Mr. Stevenson’s parents probably knew his first name at one point, but may have forgotten. His friends didn’t know it, for the same reason that unicorns don’t know the capital of North Dakota.