In one night, I had dinner at an all-you-can eat salad bar in Arcadia, met my father\’s first girlfriend in 25 years and weathered a nearly disastrous poetry emergency.

Sound the onomatopoetic sirens; this thing was a relationship 911. Free verse was about to cost my father the best relationship of his life. And it was my fault. What rhymes with \”Zero tact\”?

So there I was, sitting across the table from dad\’s new girlfriend, trying to impress her, using my best table manners, eating forkfuls of canned beets on my self-consciously dainty salad and thinking to myself: \”This is just weird.\”