I talked to my eldest son about reading tonight. About books. Turns out he’s a reader.

I asked what he might be into next. He confessed to having some trouble with some late Kerouac someone had given him.

I said maybe he should try something else. Books can be returned to. We talked about Rushdie and Marquez. But those are big books. Great but big. And he’s got a lot of commitments — a play he’s in, a film he’s trying to make, a guitar he’s trying to master.

So I said, maybe a short story or two.

He’s going to give some Tillie Olson a try (“Here I Stand Ironing”), maybe O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.”

Afterwords, I thought about Raymond Carver. I’d recently been grousing about the misogyny of some of his stories, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have something to say. Something beautiful.

I pulled this off the shelf, “A Small Good Thing.” It pulled my heart out of my chest and said, Look, look at this. This is yours. Don’t just take care of it. Take care of it in others.

Now I’m going to run lines with my younger son. He’s M-Beth in the middle school fall show.