The job change meant living in a new town 80 miles up the interstate. No problem, though she had not yet found living quarters up there. Her mother, now 80 but active as a young minnow, lived in the ‘hood and said she’d be glad to put up the daughter … temporarily.

The fifth night in this arrangement the daughter arrived home to find the door locked. It was 10. She rang the bell. Her mother came to the door and without opening talked though it:

“Go away. This isn’t working.”

Two years later, the daughter said, “Mother is a piece of work.”

+

She’s 28 but looks so young she vows never “to try to buy an alcoholic beverage until I’m 40.”  Recently she was in a music store and a guy began hitting on her. She asked him his age. Fifteen, he said.

The day will come when she’ll celebrate her youthful demeanor.

+

Slip of paper found in library book; it bore the message:

“Mr. M—2 p.m. Thursday, OB-GYN, Bedford.”

  +

On Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, George W. Bush delivered the defining speech of his Presidency. In the face of “clear evidence of peril” from a regime harboring terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, he declared, “we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Five days earlier, a 41-year-old Illinois state legislator had given a momentous speech of his own, although few recognized it as such at the time. “I don’t oppose all wars,” Barack Obama told a few hundred Chicago protesters, adding:

“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

                                                            --Dorothy Wickenden, The New Yorker.    

+

Author Ellen Slezak was asked if that was her maiden or married name. “I gave my husband a chance to change his but he opted not to. This is my family name.”