They ran in what looked like wedding dresses, or nightgowns. “No, that’s their epidermis,” my teacher said. Then he changed the slide. But all I could see—could almost hear it—was the schoolchildren shrieking, sprinting aimlessly away, skin dripping like candle wax onto Nagasaki playgrounds.

*

My Grandpa, the incontrovertible one, took us to watch Pearl Harbor. He was a Seabee, so he had skin in the game. Afterward, he explained that “the Japs” beat and tortured American POWs, so it was right to end the war swiftly. My father and brothers nodded, chimed in with corroborations. At first I said nothing, like usual, so they didn’t notice my breathing. But then I said, “they could go ahead and beat and torture me if it meant never doing that to kids’ skin.” Infamous day for Grandpa: my tears outgunned him.

*

My brother and cuñada gifted me a tumbler imprinted with photos of their daughters and me, and the words “We love Tío Logan!” I’d sip coffee from it at work, and my tenth graders started calling me Tío instead of Mister. They snapped selfies with me captioned Tío Logan on Instagram, and soon kids in all the grades were calling me Tío Logan, even those I’d never taught.

On March 13, 2020, I covered a class for another teacher who was out sick. The mug on her desk said, “Enjoy the gift of an ordinary day.”

*

I’m thirty-seven and comically thin, like Grandpa was. I don’t want his macular degeneration, but I do want to be sharp after eighty.

I’m fading by 8 o’clock when my nieces, on Zoom, put away the Legos. They display brand-licensed castles on shelves, not dismantling to invent new creations with the amassed bricks.

Later, I browse for cool sets to buy them and find the discontinued Atlantis-themed ones. But on a teacher’s pay, the price of shelter—underwater, no less—is prohibitive. Instead, they can assemble the magic passenger train to Hogwarts, that citadel of pedagogy, where my fictional counterparts get free housing. Grandpa built airstrips near Guam—and a rambler home near Hurricane, Utah, where it never rains.

*

In middle school, we used arcane slurs, like gypped, and the most stalwart teachers would swoop in to prune our vernacular. Once, in my friend Derek’s kitchen, while his mother Donna—a teacher—made us pancakes, I said Jap. I believe her parents were incarcerated at Topaz. She and Derek chuckled, charitably, then taught me not to omit syllables from their identity.

*

Grandpa had drawn, in pencil, perfect likenesses of Republican presidents, which he framed and hung in his den. Sometimes I draw, too, but usually abstracts.

When I was twelve or so, he and I stopped in Beaver for soup—“The best chicken noodle in Utah,” he’d said. He chatted up the server like she’d be so honored by the acclaim. She said yes, yes, with a polite befuddlement he did not recognize. He asked about her accent: did she come from Mexico? Yes, sir. Then he taught me to shift the decimal to calculate a 10 percent tip. He recalled that I was studying Spanish. “If I thought I could do better for my family by crossing a border in the dark, you bet your ass I’d do it,” he said. Some people don’t add up.

*

Sometimes my students will see the photos on my desk—Corinne, radiant in her gown—and say, “You’re married?” And I’ll show them my ring. And sometimes, they’ll say, “You would be a great dad.” I missed the kids so much during lockdown.

*

We had a CB radio. Grandpa’s handle was Slide Rule. I was unsure if he had been an avid slide rule user or if his brain was a substitute for one. He did use words like polygon. I was The Tank because I was born chubby and got chubbier, though I slimmed down by kindergarten. We used to laugh, watching the VHS tapes: pudgy, smiley Logan, smeared in chocolate; then skinny, surly Logan, wailing for a banana.

Grandpa’s sustenance was calculated, purposeful. Salt for the blood, carrot for the eyes. Water for any ailment.

*

They say his generation is almost gone, the greatest one. And that mine can’t hold a candle to it.

Last September I was teaching vocabulary—repeat after me: drought, famine, empathy—when the voice on the PA cut in: lockdown, lockdown, lockdown. Lights out, 23 of my kids, my kids huddled silent in the corners while I shoved piano-sized cabinets in front of both doors and waited, hackles up, until the all clear.

Barricade: a timely word.

I hear we’re building a sea wall. By the time it is finished, I doubt I’ll be around to take any beatings. I’m pretty sure Gen Z will be tortured, logarithmically. Frogs in crowded pots.

Eventually, all barricades, and the loftiest castles, succumb to decay, slide into the sea. Drones will record Earth’s soupy surface in HD, beam the footage to a solid-state drive in space. Though no kin or stranger will nod and observe; say it was right or not right, or that the soup is the best in the galaxy.

*

Vasectomy. Another timely word.

*

For my nieces, instead of the train, maybe a ten-gallon tub of mismatched bricks with no instructions, no photos to replicate. We’d spill them out on the rug. I'd take an Advil, and we'd spend hours on our knees, see what chaotic masterpiece we create—maybe a whole city, teeming with playgrounds. It doesn’t need to stay there—and really, it can’t—all put together in the living room.

I don’t know if this all adds up or if I want it to. Maybe my generation wasn’t ripped off, and maybe I will get to be old. An old uncle—maybe even a great uncle. Though I will not be a grandpa.