I’m fourteen and the smell of singed hair circles me like the halo of a pre-Renaissance Madonna. Loss already on my face. A summer crush holds out his fingers
Keller Introduces Himself: 1953
The golden age of animation came to an end slowly for Adam Keller. Once, for a film called Fantasia, Keller had created lovely images: lava flows boiling over rocks, jellyfish pulsing through a primordial sea. But pr [...]
That night Rachel and her grandmother ate dinner at a local restaurant, at a table in the backyard, which had an air of festivity—white lights strung along the fence and highlife pumping from the speakers in the corners. Groups of office workers an [...]
We were like Betty and Veronica in those comics we read endlessly—practically identical except for our hair. Andrea’s was dark and I was redheaded. Her skin tanned easily and I worried about sunburns, but we were the same height and our bodies we [...]
It is an unusually warm morning in San Francisco. My parents are sitting on the back porch reading the paper, sipping coffee. Suddenly, there is the sound of broken glass as I come flying through the window behind them. A surreal moment—it’s difficult to tell who is more stunned, my parents or I.
While nearly the entire window is gone, I have only minor cuts. The one who will suffer as a result of this outburst is my younger brother, Rory, who pushed me.
No, there will never be any shortage of labels; but at core, these academic designations will always remain, for me, rather bloodless. They will dance around my mind, flimsy moth-shadows; from time to time they will make cameo appearances in my conceptual framework—handy epithets with which to classify and organize the experience. By they will never embody it. For that I must dig deeper into my recollections, into the sights and smells and tastes of them, the imagery, texture, and moods of John, his voice, his cricket bat, and, at the end of it all, his jack bank.
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