The associate professor of English and published novelist authored "Love in the Time of the Toad" for the website's "Love Matters" section.
Author of the novels “Kids These Days” and “This is Just Exactly Like You,” Perry’s Huffington Post essay “Love in the Time of the Toad” paints a portrait of home life and some of the anxieties he encounters when he learns of his own father’s stroke.
From the conclusion of the essay:
“…even as we pine for it, neither of us would go back to being 24. We didn’t know anything back then. Or what we thought we knew was wrong. Not that I know much more now, of course. I don’t have any idea how to save this dog, or my father, or myself. I don’t know what to do with either of these boys, except to fail them as honestly as possible. I know to beg The Toad not to clock his brother with his dump truck. To hold the baby as much as I can. To write my father a little more often, ask him how all this is meant to go. And to reach out for my wife’s hand, there in the dark, or in the pooled light of a lamp left on, while the kids sleep and the phone doesn’t ring and the dog chases dream-deer in slow motion downstairs – to reach for my wife to remember, one more time, that she’s there.“