When I pull the Celica away from the curb, the tires slip on a sheet of ice hidden beneath the snow. The back end of the car jerks sideways, like it’s been slapped, and then I’m sliding down the street as much as driving on it. I like the feeling. I’m the only car on the road, and just before the stop sign I hit the brakes a little harder than necessary, and I end up in the middle of two lanes with the front end aimed toward a mailbox. From this position, I start a kind of zigzag, back and forth across the centerline, drawing a gray snake in the snow in the rearview mirror.

He hates things like this, my father. He hates senseless, irreverent behavior. His blood boils reading the local crime-watch section in the paper, and he can’t even look at Cops on TV. “Nobody in this country knows how to behave anymore,” he’s fond of saying. “Most of these punks, they’re getting arrested—why? Because they’re on the take? No. Because they’re acting like assholes in public.” It’s one of his refrains, and an easy one, since he’s too worn-out to get into trouble anymore. Ten years ago, the last time he flew down to Florida for vacation, he got drunk on his layover at JFK and raised a ruckus on the plane while they were waiting to take off. He demanded a bourbon and called the steward a fruitcake. He lit a cigarette. They threw him off, and he had to wait in the airport bar another four hours for the next available flight.

He told me that story himself. Another time, he told me about getting banned for life from a deli for throwing a “light” pound of roast beef at a meat cutter. But when he gave up drinking, he stopped telling the unflattering stories. Now he talks like some retired don who’s banked enough respect over the years to be living off the interest.

The parking lots downtown are salted and soppy. I return his videos—Harper and The Drowning Pool—and buy blank tapes and bulk paper towels at the Big Bear. I walk through the aisles in the grocery store for a while, then ask the woman in the checkout line if they have any gluten. She looks at me like I’m just learning the language and says, “You mean glue?”

“Gluten,” I say. “You bake with it.”

She tells me there’s a specialty store in the mall that has all the unheard-of stuff. But I’m not feeling quite that ambitious.