After a week, at a hotel, of tipping doormen, bell boys, waiters, hatcheck girls, ad infinitum, a traveler was completely fed up with the whole system.
For many months afterward, and at many times since, I was swallowed up in the deep fog of grief—what I think of as the void—an emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even to breathe.
In fact, this wonderful country whose bounties we benefit from was built by so many people who made endless and often the ultimate sacrifices before we were even born.
He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for everydrop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.
Our society idolises the independent individual with consumer power and endless choices. Retirement looks like an ebbing tide withdrawing such freedom from reach.
As I looked out of the window into the black emptiness, I wondered about the great mystery of death, and thought of Helen Burns, who was so sure her spirit would go to heaven.
She drew another match against the wall: it was again light, and in the lustre there stood the old grandmother, so bright and radiant, so mild, and with such an expression of love.
The first project that we really discovered that we could do, the material is, like the possibility with it is pretty endless, is that we made some baseball bats.