This one is from my brother.

My younger brother, Wade, is sixteen. He recently got a job answering phones and putting stickers on pizza boxes at the local Papa John's, which is conveniently located in the far corner of a strip mall about five minutes from our house.

Until Friday of last week, he had a North Carolina driver's license but wasn't legal to drive in Virginia, where the driving age is sixteen and three months. I had been taking him to work.

So it's Tuesday, and I'm picking him up from work at 9:30PM in his green Papa John's polo shirt and khaki Papa John's hat. He gets into the car in silence, takes off his hat, and closes his eyes. I back out of my parking space and turn right onto Silverbrook Rd.

"So . . . how was work?" I ask.

"It was okay. This guy called, and he wasn't in the computer system, so I was entering his stuff into the computer, and I thought he said 'Ferris Drive' so I asked, 'Ferris as in Ferris wheel?' And he said, 'No, Paris as in Italy.'"

I look, and Wade is giving this sort of blank stare.

"Oh my God," I say. "What did you do?"

"I asked him, 'And what would you like to order, sir?'"

Cerebella Faerienoggin

Unemployment was making me feel worthless so I finally got a job working at Fancy Crafts, a jaunty little gift shop in Wadesboro. I pull weeds, talk to customers, troubleshoot e-mail clients, and clean collections of rooster wall hangings for a sarcastic, energetic woman named Denise.

In the mid-90's the Boyd’s Bears craze hit mothers, wives, and little old ladies all across America. Often in the form of resin figurines depicting bears and other animals in cute situations like going to the dentist, Boyd’s Bears were in high demand from stores like Fancy Crafts. However, it seems that after the turn of the millennium America collectively realized that their favorite plastic bears were hideous and hokier than they had bargained for. When I began working at Fancy Crafts, all Boyd’s Bears were 75% off. Denise was desperate to get rid of them, and one day we sat down at the computer to see if the internet offered any hope. On e-bay entire collections were up for 1 dollar with no bids and an hour left on the auction. Nobody in the world wanted handcrafted figurines of bears wearing fireman suits and rescuing kittens from trees anymore, it seemed.

Today Denise and I started boxing up and inventorying her entire stock of Boyd’s Bears, which took up half of the cluttered storage room. Apparently, every figurine has a name. It was for this reason that, today, I caught myself saying things like:

“Did you want Widdle Coldfin or Waddle Coldfin?”

and

“Do you have another Cerebella Faerienoggin?”