Word: boying
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...says, abandoned him and his mother Lucille when he was an infant. O'Neal wrote a caustic rap song about it in 1994 called Biological Didn't Bother. O'Neal's mother eventually married Philip Harrison, an Army staff sergeant, who imposed, naturally enough, a disciplined upbringing on a boy who was growing at an unruly rate. "I never see my biological dad," says the unmarried O'Neal, who has two children of his own, Taahirah, 4, and Shareef, 6 months, who live with their mothers. "Don't even know what he looks like. What if that guy had raised...
...shut if that's what it takes. That's one of the themes of the new publications and websites devoted to fathering. The best of the bunch is Dads magazine, which in its premiere issue this month includes stories and columns written by fathers on the N word, "the boy code" and how to survive a trip to Disney World. The magazine even sneaks in a cooking column. But Dads is bigger, in stories and ads, on SUVs, watches and sports apparel than on diapers and baby equipment. Dads and Dadmag.com an unrelated online fathering magazine, also favor the sports...
Tony Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy (Little, Brown; 227 pages; $23.95), blithely and successfully counters this trend. It covers a year in the life of Jim Glass Jr., from his 10th to 11th birthdays, in the tiny hamlet of Aliceville, N.C., during the mid-1930s. His father died of a heart attack a week before Jim was born, and he has been raised by his mother and her three bachelor brothers, Zeno and the twins Coran and Al. When the book opens, Jim has never traveled more than 30 miles from Aliceville. What he doesn't know about...
Earley, whose 1997 collection of stories Here We Are in Paradise earned considerable praise and attention, presents Jim's story as a series of quietly, precisely rendered vignettes. In the first one, the birthday boy is allowed to help the grownups hoe the cornfield in preparation for spring planting. Thrilled at this recognition of his new maturity, Jim listens to Uncle Zeno explain how to use the hoe and then sets to work. After a while, though, the task becomes less thrilling. He puts down his hoe and starts throwing rocks: "When Jim picked up his hoe, he noticed that...
...fill the place left by his dead father. Preserving the present moment is as impossible as making the ocean hold still. Grownups who dwell overlong on such a thought may be accused, with some justice, of rank sentimentality. But such folks can watch this knowledge, in Jim the Boy, dawn on a child and remember or imagine their own ages of innocence...