#family-and-identity

#family-and-identity

For all the barking and grunting Appa does, he proves time and again that his hardened heart can be soft and tender. He bounces around his convenience store with a wisdom that is built from being a neighborhood pillar for years. He obsesses over illegally parked cars, gives away snacks that are relegated to the bottom shelf, and has an entirely cringy line of hilarious ideas as to the hierarchy of thieves.

The nearness of bees, and of other things that agitate most people, calms me. My father had three daughters and he ate watermelon with slices of cheese on the porch and he said once, over watermelon, that he was very lucky to have three girls: one beautiful, one kind, and one intelligent. Classification is a laudable scientific instinct. The ways in which the labelling and sorting don't quite work are the glory of the process,