“Japanese,” she said in an aggressive whisper as she leaned in, making it almost conspiratorial like an inside joke, only I had no fucking clue what she was on about.

She’d said it before, too, with her wide hyena-like grin. Those first few times, I laughed it off. What else was I going to do? Her crazy eyes exposed little to no depth other than malice. Was that malice directed at me? It wasn’t quite clear.

They loved their father. There was no doubt about that. They had forgiven him, but some unhealed wounds continued to fester even in adulthood. Those open emotional scars made their father’s transgressions hard to forget. But it was their father’s refusal to acknowledge the pain he had caused that compounded chinks in their psyche and kept their relationship with him lukewarm in the best of times. Amir’s revelation, though, was yet another reason for Cyrus to figure out how to spend more time here. He and his siblings needed each other.

Bardstown will be where real bourbon aficionados go, not the wannabes who fetishize Kentucky and the nostalgia of bourbon, but never make the effort to meet the locals. Bardstown should be for the folks looking for more than just transactional tourism.

For any parent, a road trip can be an extreme stressor. It wasn’t much different for my dad, except it was all compounded his divorce, visiting his family he hadn't seen in years as they were all in California, DC or Iran, and that he had to drive a 1978 Ford Maverick all by himself with three young kids at varying states of defiance.

But the biggest violator of my mother’s ban on her children’s consumption of sweetened cereal was not my father, it was her father—my grandfather. There is no question whether or not he was aware of the embargo—he was. He willfully and knowingly chose to ignore it. Nothing my mother said or did could have convinced my grandfather of the merits of her moratorium on sugar filled cereals. I am not sure she even put up a fight. Her acquiescence was likely due to her in depth knowledge that his stubbornness—which she picked up from him and subsequently passed along to me—would likely further entrench his position if she were to protest loudly.

Then he stomped his feet as loud as he could have on our wooden porch. Almost instantaneously, the two figures in the garage dropped whatever metal vessels they had with them for carrying the gas they were planning on siphoning from my parent’s cars. And before the containers hit the ground they were scurrying away, reversing their path to our garage. Kicking up dust in their midst. Gravel and asphalt crackling under the their footfalls.

Asking for condiments was a violation almost as grave as not wanting to try something unfamiliar. It was a corollary rookies would often violate. No matter how much we tried to stop or prepare them for the protocol, we’d inevitably fail. One such occasion came in my sophomore year of high school, one of my less experienced friends joined us for the usual Friday feast of grilled meats, rice (one bowl of plain rice, another bowl of rice with egg yolk), and salad.