Nicknames I Have Known (Or: An Elegy for the Mooch)
Last summer, right before my grandfather died, my mother and her boyfriend, Jim, rode their bikes to his house. My grandparents live four miles away from my mom, and it’s a straight shot down a semi-wooded New Jersey street where cars can only go 35 miles per hour but usually go 50. Jim’s in okay shape, for a 50-something-year-old man, but my mom is one of those people who has time in the morning—who wakes up at 6 a.m., doesn’t snooze, runs five miles, eats breakfast, reads the news, and then gets ready for work. Jim, like the rest of us, tends to lag a bit behind. That day, he professed exhaustion about the return trip and declared that my grandmother should give them a ride back in her car.
