SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize:.
The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming – and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.
It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you’d spoil it with a blowout. When.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn’t feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?
She never wore a watch, and for this she didn’t need one.
I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down – look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.
It’s a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.
What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.
But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.
Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.
The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.
It wasn’t all a waste,” she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.
I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.
This is all going to scare us to death,” she said. “You and me. But we’re still going to have to do it.
It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.
We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings – the whole bag of tricks we call culture.
So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.
But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point – is that a strange notion?
It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted.