I was feeling everything too much. Everything pulled at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools.
My head was a condemned church with a ceiling of bats, but I swung from this dark mood to euphoria when I thought about leaving.
I’ve purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don’t think anybody’s written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers.
She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles.
Then he got more books. He saved all the books.
You can’t ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It’s the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.
We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.
He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?
In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.
I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I’d known. But I tried anyway.
The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do.
It was always difficult to get cattle returned once a marriage was dissolved.
And that’s actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we’re able to work with thousands and thousands more students.
You know, it’s been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.
Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.
There is travel and there are babies; everything else is drudgery and death.
We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.
Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.
I’m better than you think. I’m even better than I think I am.