Shortly before my maternal grandfather died of prostate cancer, he gave my Uncle Bill, his eldest son and namesake, a box full of things whose inheritance he wanted to ensure while he still could. Its contents included, among other things, an official MLB baseball of uncertain context, a program from JFK’s 1961 inauguration, and most tantalizingly, a manila envelope that read, in Pop-Pop’s Sharpie scrawl, “Letters to Anita: Do Not Open Until After I’m Dead.”…

The summer before I started high school, my neighbor Allison and I were bored. So bored that once when my stepmother left to go grocery shopping we turned upside down every object in my kitchen that we could lift and then hung like bats from the couch awaiting her return. When we ran out of such creative solutions, we started binge-watching The X-Files .

My dad had purchased some steeply discounted X-Files

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