I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.
It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.
The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is – at least for some – unacceptable.
No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.
One of the down-side factors to living alone is that you sometimes get overly absorbed with how exact segments of time are consumed, and can begin to feel a pleasure with life that is hopelessly tinged with longing.
For writers – even sportswriters – bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more familiar.
My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.
Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.
She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.
Life is full of surprises, a wise man said, and would not be worth having if it were not.
And there is no nicer time on earth than now – everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential – the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.
Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking.
Men are a strange breed.
And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting. I.
It’s not an unusual American story. Just as there’s no right way to plan a life and no right way to live one – only plenty of wrong ways.
Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.
This is the only badge of true friendship I’m sure of: not to be curious.
Possibly this is one more version of “disappearing into your life”, the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There’s no evidence you’re dead, but you act that way.
I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark.
Towns aren’t even towns anymore,” Vicki said, sensing my distraction with this sad evolution, and giving me a hug around my middle. “Dallas wasn’t ever one, when you get right down to it. It’s just a suburb looking for a place to light.