There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!
I want to broaden the meaning of “wife.” When I call Ellen my wife I don’t want to mean that she is simply the chore-doer but that she’s the guiding intelligence behind her half of our household. Ellen doesn’t take care of the children the way I would, not by a long shot. If I were the stay-at-home mother, they would wear different clothes, eat different lunches, attend different activities. The cleaning and the laundry would get done in a different order and to a different standard.
Well, you don’t say it. That’s what. I regretted the gift of the cookies and all it had wrought, so I kept my yap shut.
In other words, memoir writers are egotists, exhibitionists, and/or self-indulgent narcissists. Now, where have I heard that before? The 1820s saw a memoir boom comparable to the one we have been experiencing for some 15 years, and it drew similar-caliber gunfire. In 1825, Henry Mackenzie waggishly defined autobiography as "the confession of a person to himself instead of the priest,—generally gets absolution too easily." Four years later, an anonymous author in Blackwood's Magazine opined that the form should be the province of people of "lofty reputation" or who have something of "historical importance to say"—not of the "vulgar" who try to "excite prurient interest that may command a sale."
Smoke-browned fish on a white plate,
dawn-grey body on a silver table --
we do not like to linger
on how the dead may still nourish us.
I didn’t want you to get another dog, Nikki told me once, because that would mean that we were really over. You could never bring a new dog back into our old house with Otis there.
