Summary

"Seat Belts."

The author writes of getting down to his lowest adult weight ever, commenting that “the heaviest version of my body was past tense. My current body was present tense. There was no limit to how light I could be, and I knew I needed to live in the future” (196). He then describes picking up his mother, who has just returned from a visit to Cuba. He teases her about her high number of trips abroad suggests she does not like Mississippi, or America. She asks him about his father, who had visited shortly before.

The author then narrates the visit of his father (5’8’ tall, 250 pounds) – how he never used a seatbelt, how he fell asleep watching the author exercise, how he kept telling the author he was proud of him … and how he told a story of...