Baby Carriage Quotes

As they passed the rows of houses they saw through the open doors that men were sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing. What has happened?' the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby carriage along the sidewalk. Why, we've had a revolution, your Majesty -- as you ought to know very well,' replied the man; 'and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City.' Hm!' said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. 'If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?' I really do not know,' replied the man, with a deep sigh. 'Perhaps the women are made of cast-iron.

Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit.

He tackled a woman's baby carriage. After the seven-month-old baby skidded across the pavement and began bawling his eyes out, Bill Brady started shouting at the toddler, 'What are you, a pussy? Walk it off! Walk it off!' After the mother shouted out her baby's age and how he wasn't able to walk yet, Bill Brady started barking in the vexed mother's face like she was a referee who had made a bad call.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!

And again, the dark street. The dark, dark street. The women out shopping for the evening meal of course, and baby carriage and the silver bicycle were already painted out by the darkness; most of the commuters too were already in place in their filing-drawer houses. A half-forsaken chasm of time ....

In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. The Invention of Hugo Selnick (screenplay Hugo)

Did you bring the charms?” Wulf asked Diesel. Diesel took the charms from his pocket and held them in his palm so Wulf could see. “They have an excellent selection of baby carriages at Target,” I whispered to Diesel. “Not now,” Diesel said. “Get a grip.” “Was I bad? DO I need to get punished? Maybe I need a good paddling.” Wulf looked like he was thinking about rolling his eyes, and Diesel wrapped an arm around my shoulders and dragged me to him. “We’ll get to that later,” Diesel said. “I’d be happy to paddle the wench if you’re too bust.” Hatchet said. Diesel cut his eyes to him, and Hatchet took a step back. -Lizzy, Diesel, and Hatchet, page 304.

Last but not least, he hated with all the hatred that was in him the rising generation, the appalling boors who find it necessary to talk and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who jostle you in the street without a word of apology, and who, without expressing or even indicating regret, drive the wheels of a baby-carriage into your legs.

How to make her run? No problem there. For a fearful shadow lies constantly over the residents of Uneasy Street. It casts itself through the ostensibly friendly handshake, or the gorgeously wrapped package. It beams out from the baby's carriage, the barber's chair, the beauty parlor. Every neighbor is suspect, every outsider, every period; even one's own husband or wife of sweetheart. There is no ease on Uneasy Street. The longer one's tenancy, the more untenable it becomes.

Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words. THE END

A year ago, Elsa would have thought it insane that any woman would think to walk from Oklahoma or Texas or Alabama to California, especially pushing a baby carriage. Now she knew better. When your children were dying, you did anything to save them, even walk over mountains and across deserts.

CALVIN: Hey, I got some mail! It's a Valentine card. HOBBES: From Susie Derkins! CALVIN: It says "Please be my Valentine." HOBBES: You're Susie's Valentine! CALVIN: I'm not her Valentine just because I got this in the mail, am I? Does the Post Master General know about this? HOBBES: Calvin and Susie, sitting in a tree-ee! Kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee! CALVIN: I don't have the KISS her, do I?! Is that what Valentines do??! Oh, gross! HOBBES: First comes lo-ove, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage! CALVIN: This can't be happening! I need a lawyer! She can't make me be her Valentine! HOBBES: Here she comes! Here comes Susie! SUSIE: Hi, Calvin. CALVIN: Get away from me! I'm not your Valentine! Take your card back! Eww! Girls! YECCHH! SUSIE: That card wasn't for YOU, you Moron. Didn't you read the back of the envelope? CALVIN: "Calvin, please give this to Hobbes." HOBBES?! HOBBES: Me? Really? Hot dog! Smooch City, here I come!

What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. Look at us. We run a tightrope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol. kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now! This is not the life of a simplicity but the life of a multiplicity that the wise men warn us of.

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit.

Rome was buzzing. Quite literally. Absolutely everyone had a mobile phone, and absolutely everybody was calling absolutely everybody else absolutely all the time. I wondered if there were some law making them compulsory. Frighteningly, it's possible, these days. I swear I saw a street beggar stop and take a call on his cellular. I even heard a trill from a baby carriage, but it turned out to be a toy mobile phone. They start dickhead training early in Italy.

Like I didn’t know what getting a girl pregnant meant: sex. Boys lay down on top of girls and wiggled around until they got the feeling. When that happened, a mysterious something called jizz came from the boy’s dink. It sank into the girl’s belly, and nine months later it was time for diapers and a baby carriage.

The baby carriage is the sorriest joke in Europe today, for you never see a baby in one. . . . Instead they are filled with pots and pans and tools, and all the impediments of nomads.

Miana had been irritable all day in the carriage, but then if I’d swallowed a whole baby and it insisted on kicking the hell out of my insides I might be less than my normal tolerant self.

In Denmark, “social trust”—a general feeling that you trust your fellow citizens and the pillar institutions of government, law courts, police, hospitals, and so on—is generally found to be the highest in the world. A perfect example of Danish “social trust” is the image of babies sleeping in carriages outside a restaurant while the parents eat inside. You might say, “But no one is watching!” A Dane will say, “Everyone is watching.

if you so much as make a single joke right now or butcher a playground nursery rhyme about trees and kissing and baby carriages, I'll let myself into your apartment and use your comic book collection as kindling. Capiche?

Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage.

Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure. It is night and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of raindrops, which the wind blows against the shatters.

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man . . .” Evie chanted as she played with Stephen in the Challons’ private railway carriage. They occupied one side of a deep upholstered settee, with Sebastian lounging in the other corner. The baby clapped his tiny hands along with his grandmother, his rapt gaze fastened on her face. “Make me a cake as fast as you can . . .” The nursery rhyme concluded, and Evie cheerfully began again. “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake—” “My sweet,” Sebastian interrupted, “we’ve been involved in the manufacture of cakes ever since we set foot on the train. For my sanity, I beg you to choose another game.” “Stephen,” Evie asked her grandson, “do you want to play peekaboo?” “No,” came the baby’s grave answer. “Do you want to play ‘beckoning the chickens?’” “No.” Evie’s impish gaze flickered to her husband before she asked the child, “Do you want to play horsie with Gramps?” “Yes!” Sebastian grinned ruefully and reached for the boy. “I knew I should have kept quiet.” He sat Stephen on his knee and began to bounce him, making him squeal with delight.

Death was just as close, but not behind him; it was everywhere. It was inescapable; he felt death’s physical presence—as if death itself were something alive. Like in the old pictures, a creature that can hide behind a bed of asters or behind a baby carriage and can come out and touch you.

There is a safety mechanism in place [to ensure the perambulator doesn't turn back into a purse with a baby in it] : if anything weighing more than a pound and a half-about the weight of a three-volume novel-is in the carriage of the perambulator, it will not transform.

Independence changed everything. Independence changed nothing. Eight years after the British left, we now had free government schools, running water and paved roads. But Jaipur still felt the same to me as it had ten years ago, the first time I stepped foot on its dusty soil. On the way to our first appointment of the morning, Malik and I nearly collided with a man carrying cement bags on his head when a bicycle cut between us. The cyclist, hugging a six-foot ladder under his arm, caused a horse carriage to sideswipe a pig, who ran squealing into a narrow alley. At one point, we stepped aside and waited for a raucous band of hijras to pass. The sari-clad, lipstick-wearing men were singing and dancing in front of a house to bless the birth of a baby boy. So accustomed were we to the odors of the city—cow dung, cooking fires, coconut hair oil, sandalwood incense and urine—that we barely noticed them.

without having to pay for them with your eyeteeth’, ‘All yours for $58. You’re a lucky man, Mr Veteran.’ The homes sold hand over fist. In that strange, intermediate world between country and city, men and women forged countless alliances, exploring peace together. ‘In front of almost every house along Levittown’s 100 miles of winding streets sits a tricycle or a baby carriage,’ a report for Time magazine noted in the summer of 1950. ‘In Levittown, all activity stops from 12 to 2 in the afternoon; that is nap time.’ Levittown marked the start of the explosive growth of suburbia, a concept that stands for an entire culture, a specific kind of life and society. To countless GIs suburbia was the beginning of modern life, of ‘time for things like

You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher’s knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb. First came an elaborate mouse-gray vehicle of Belgian make, with fat autoid tires and luxurious springs, so large that it could not enter our puny elevator. It rolled on sidewalks in a slow stately mystery, with the trapped baby inside lying supine, well covered with down, silk and fur; only his eyes moved, warily, and sometimes they turned upward with one swift sweep of their showy lashes to follow the receding of branch-patterned blueness that flowed away from the edge of the half-cocked hood of the carriage, and presently he would dart a suspicious glance at my face to see if the teasing trees and sky did not belong, perhaps to the same order of things as did rattles and parental humor. There followed a lighter carriage, and in this, as he spun along, he would tend to rise, straining at his straps; clutching at the edges; standing there less like the groggy passenger of a pleasure boat than like an entranced scientist in a spaceship; surveying the speckled skeins of a live, warm world; eyeing with philosophic interest the pillow he had managed to throw overboard; falling out himself when a strap burst one day. Still later he rode in one of those small contraptions called strollers; from initial springy and secure heights the child came lower and lower, until, when he was about one and a half, he touched ground in front of the moving stroller by slipping forward out of his seat and beating the sidewalk with his heels in anticipation of being set loose in some public garden. A new wave of evolution started to swell, gradually lifting him again from the ground, when, for his second birthday, he received a four-foot-long, silver-painted Mercedes racing car operated by inside pedals, like an organ, and in this he used to drive with a pumping, clanking noise up and down the sidewalk of the Kurfurstendamm while from open windows came the multiplied roar of a dictator still pounding his chest in the Neander valley we had left far behind.

A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.

some point over the next few hours, she left some food and water for her children in their room and opened their bedroom window. She wrote out the name of her doctor, with a telephone number, and stuck it to the baby carriage in the hallway. Then she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life. 2. Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.

A massive ball of brown water, uprooted tree trunks, sheared rooftops, bloated horses, stiff dogs and cats, shattered church windows, broken pews, sodden Bibles, Memorial Day flags, busted brick walls, twisted train cars, splintered rail lines, bowed streetlamps, upturned carriages, naked dolls, bent tin soldiers, dented red wagons, books, black stoves, beds, tables, armchairs, mantels, photographs, love letters, wedding dresses, baby booties, and masses of drowned humanity careens straight for us. Neither Eugene Eggar nor I can move.

I took the bucket off my head. I looked at the carriage. The baby was NOT sitting in the carriage watching me. The baby was GONE. I looked under all the bushes, and up the tree, but I couldn’t find the baby. I’d lost the baby. Losing a baby is bad. I panicked. I ran inside and took a potato from the kitchen. From under my bed I scooped up lots of fluff and dust bunnies and stuck them to the top of the potato with my glue stick. I drew a face on the potato. I ran outside and put the potato-baby in the carriage. Maybe Mrs Whitman wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t her baby.

He was sitting at his desk. He had to get some relief from seeing what he did not want to see. The factory was empty. There was only the night watchman who’d come on duty with his dogs. He was down in the parking lot, patrolling the perimeter of the double-thick chain-link fence, a fence topped off, after the riots, with supplemental scrolls of razor ribbon that were to admonish the boss each and every morning he pulled in and parked his car, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” He was sitting alone in the last factory left in the worst city in the world. And it was worse even than sitting there during the riots, Springfield Avenue in flames, South Orange Avenue in flames, Bergen Street under attack, sirens going off, weapons firing, snipers from rooftops blasting the street lights, looting crowds crazed in the street, kids carrying off radios and lamps and television sets, men toting armfuls of clothing, women pushing baby carriages heavily loaded with cartons of liquor and cases of beer, people pushing pieces of new furniture right down the center of the street, stealing sofas, cribs, kitchen tables, stealing washers and dryers and ovens—stealing not in the shadows but out in the open. Their strength is tremendous, their teamwork is flawless. The shattering of glass windows is thrilling. The not paying for things is intoxicating. The American appetite for ownership is dazzling to behold. This is shoplifting. Everything free that everyone craves, a wonton free-for-all free of charge, everyone uncontrollable with thinking, Here it is! Let it come! In Newark’s burning Mardi Gras streets, a force is released that feels redemptive, something purifying is happening, something spiritual and revolutionary perceptible to all. The surreal vision of household appliances out under the stars and agleam in the glow of the flames incinerating the Central Ward promises the liberation of all mankind. Yes, here it is, let it come, yes, the magnificent opportunity, one of human history’s rare transmogrifying moments: the old ways of suffering are burning blessedly away in the flames, never again to be resurrected, instead to be superseded, within only hours, by suffering that will be so gruesome, so monstrous, so unrelenting and abundant, that its abatement will take the next five hundred years. The fire this time—and next? After the fire? Nothing. Nothing in Newark ever again.

Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops. When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by. As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs" Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea.

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest—dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare,—the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens,—young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the “dear body” and “dear heart.” II

While Dr. Weeks attended to Devon’s injuries, Kathleen went to visit West. Even before she reached the open door of his room, she heard noise and laughter drifting into the hallway. She stood at the threshold, watching with a touch of fond resignation as she saw West sitting up in bed, regaling a group that included a half-dozen servants, Pandora, Cassandra, both dogs, and Hamlet. Helen stood beside a lamp, reading the temperature of a glass thermometer. Thankfully West no longer appeared to be shivering, and his color had improved. “…then I glimpsed a man wading back out into the river,” he was saying, “toward a half-submerged railway carriage with people trapped inside. And I said to myself, ‘That man is a hero. Also an idiot. Because he’s already been in the water for too long, and he won’t be able to save them, and he’s about to sacrifice his life for nothing.’ I proceeded to climb down the embankment and found Sutton. ‘Where is the earl?’ I asked.” West paused for dramatic effect, relishing the rapt attention of his audience. “And where do you think Sutton pointed? Out to the river, where that reckless fool had just saved a trio of children, and was wading after them with a baby in one arm and a woman on the other.” “The man was Lord Trenear?” one of the housemaids gasped. “None other.” The entire group exclaimed with pleasure and possessive pride. “Nothing to it, for a bloke as big as his lordship,” one of the footmen said with a grin. “I should think he’ll be put in the papers for this,” another exclaimed. “I hope so,” West said, “if only because I know how he would loathe it.

A knock at the enameled door of the carriage altered them to the presence of a porter and a platform inspector just outside. Sebastian looked up and handed the baby back to Evie. He went to speak to the men. After a minute or two, he came back from the threshold with a basket. Looking both perturbed and amused, he brought it to Phoebe. “This was delivered to the station for you.” “Just now?” Phoebe asked with a nonplussed laugh. “Why, I believe it’s Ernestine’s mending basket! Don’t say the Ravenels went to the trouble of sending someone all the way to Alton to return it?” “It’s not empty,” her father said. As he set the basket in her lap, it quivered and rustled, and a blood-curdling yowl emerged. Astonished, Phoebe fumbled with the latch on the lid and opened it. The black cat sprang out and crawled frantically up her front, clinging to her shoulder with such ferocity that nothing could have detached her claws. “Galoshes!” Justin exclaimed, hurrying over to her. “Gosh-gosh!” Stephen cried in excitement. Phoebe stroked the frantic cat and tried to calm her. “Galoshes, how . . . why are you . . . oh, this is Mr. Ravenel’s doing! I’m going to murder him. You poor little thing.” Justin came to stand beside her, running his hands over the dusty, bedraggled feline. “Are we going to keep her now, Mama?” “I don’t think we have a choice,” Phoebe said distractedly. “Ivo, will you go with Justin to the dining compartment, and fetch her some food and water?” The two boys dashed off immediately. “Why has he done this?” Phoebe fretted. “He probably couldn’t make her stay at the barn, either. But she’s not meant to be a pet. She’s sure to run off as soon as we reach home.” Resuming his seat next to Evie, Sebastian said dryly, “Redbird, I doubt that creature will stray more than an arm’s length from you.” Discovering a note in the mending basket, Phoebe plucked it out and unfolded it. She instantly recognized West’s handwriting. Unemployed Feline Seeking Household Position To Whom It May Concern, I hereby offer my services as an experienced mouser and personal companion. References from a reputable family to be provided upon request. Willing to accept room and board in lieu of pay. Indoor lodgings preferred. Your servant, Galoshes the Cat Glancing up from the note, Phoebe found her parents’ questioning gazes on her. “Job application,” she explained sourly. “From the cat.” “How charming,” Seraphina exclaimed, reading over her shoulder. “‘Personal companion,’ my foot,” Phoebe muttered. “This is a semi-feral animal who has lived in outbuildings and fed on vermin.” “I wonder,” Seraphina said thoughtfully. “If she were truly feral, she wouldn’t want any contact with humans. With time and patience, she might become domesticated.” Phoebe rolled her eyes. “It seems we’ll find out.” The boys returned from the dining car with a bowl of water and a tray of refreshments. Galoshes descended to the floor long enough to devour a boiled egg, an anchovy canapé, and a spoonful of black caviar from a silver dish on ice. Licking her lips and purring, the cat jumped back into Phoebe’s lap and curled up with a sigh.

It’s natural…love, marriage, and then baby carriage.

Life was pretty perfect. All because a sexy chick broke her abstinence pledge to enjoy a night of fun. One hot roll in bed blossomed into love, marriage, and quite a few baby carriages. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

[In marriage you] go through stages, like acts in a play. Act One, you fall in love, and the birds twitter and the bees go buzz, and you'll never love somebody else as long as you both shall live, amen. Act Two, enter the baby carriage, and all of a sudden he catches sight of a pair of firm young tits and figures life is short. Act Three...you realize there's no point letting the husbands have all the fun. [Vivian Schuyler]

Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.” Speculators also took out real estate advertisements in African American newspapers, even if the featured properties were not for sale. The ads’ purpose was to attract potential African American buyers to walk around white areas that were targeted for blockbusting

I looked under all the bushes, and up the tree, but I couldn’t find the baby. I’d lost the baby. Losing a baby is bad. I panicked. I ran inside and took a potato from the kitchen. From under my bed I scooped up lots of fluff and dust bunnies and stuck them to the top of the potato with my glue stick. I drew a face on the potato. I ran outside and put the potato-baby in the carriage. Maybe Mrs Whitman wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t her baby.

I climbed up a tree. The baby sat in its carriage and watched me. I climbed down the tree. The baby sat in its carriage and watched me. I rode my bike up and down the path. The baby sat in its carriage and watched me. I asked the baby what it wanted to do now but it didn’t answer. It just sat in its carriage and watched me. I sang the baby a song and it sat in its carriage and started to scream loudly. The baby wouldn’t stop screaming loudly, even when I stopped singing.

I didn’t know what to do so I put a bucket over my head. The baby stopped screaming. I took the bucket off my head. I looked at the carriage. The baby was NOT sitting in the carriage watching me. The baby was GONE.

We’ve been acculturated by fairy tales and rescue fantasies—Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rapunzel—to believe life begins when a boy chooses us, picks us out of the crowd, anoints us as worthy, redeems us, saves us. These stories present love and marriage but skip right over what happens to get to the baby carriage.[*4]

He watched it over and over for that shoot-out scene where the baby carriage is rolling down the train station stairs.

Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another, the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TV, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop.

the future Helen Hennessy Vendler, would eventually become the most influential poetry critic in America. As a toddler, Sylvia used to “dance around” the two mothers as they walked. Little did she know the baby in the carriage would become a renowned Harvard professor who would one day champion her poetry.

If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop.

I don’t know what got her into this kind of life. I know she isn’t made for it. She’s such a healthy girl, she’s full of living. She needs a guy. She needs a home. And kids. If they put her in prison, she’ll decay. I want to see her laughing. I want to see her bending over a stove. Wheeling a baby carriage down the street. I can’t see her behind bars. I can’t see that.

Here, I'll take her," her husband said. He scooped the baby from Juliet's arms and cradled her to his chest. Immediately the whimpering stopped. Charlotte stared at him in wide-eyed fascination. Juliet watched a passing carriage, too ashamed of herself, and her conflicting feelings, to meet Gareth's blue, blue eyes. "She's wet," she warned. "Ah, well, we've got more important things to worry about than that, don't we, Charlotte?" he said lightly, adjusting the baby's frilly bonnet around her tiny face. Juliet caught the double meaning and the tension in his words, knowing well what he meant. She threw him a quick, guilty glance, but Gareth didn't see it. He was too busy ignoring her, playing with the baby, swinging her high over his head and laughing as she broke out in a smile as bright as the sunshine blazing down from above. Juliet looked on a little wistfully. What she wouldn't give to be so happy, so carefree; what she wouldn't give to be able to take back that terrible moment in the church when he'd discovered Charles's ring still on her finger. Why hadn't she removed it once and for all this morning? She had hurt him — deeply. And she felt sick about it. "Like that, do you?" Charlotte chortled in glee. "Here, let's do it again," he said cheerfully, and out of the corner of her eye, Juliet saw that Perry was watching him with those cool gray eyes of his that didn't miss a trick. Perry knew that all was not right here, and Juliet suspected he knew Lord Gareth's sudden silliness with the baby was just a cover for the pain he had to be feeling. And now her husband was swinging Charlotte up and over his head once more, making foolish faces and even more foolish noises at her until he had her shrieking in delight. "Watch this — wheeeeeee!" Perry, observing, just shook his head. "If anyone knows how to act like a juvenile, it's you, Gareth." "Yes, and the day one forgets how to be young is the day one gets old. Let's do it again, Charlie-girl. Ready, now? Here ... we ... go!" Again he swung the infant — high, high, higher. Once more, Charlotte shrieked with glee, and even Juliet felt a reluctant smile creep over her face. Forced or not, her husband's good humor was infectious. The Den members were also grinning, elbowing each other and eyeing him as though he had lost his mind along with his bachelorhood. "I don't believe I'm seeing this," murmured Chilcot. "Yes, what would they say down at White's, Gareth?" Perry was shaking his head. "Well, all I can say is that I'm exceedingly grateful I don't know anyone on this side of town," he drawled. "I daresay you are making a complete arse of yourself, Gareth." "Yes, and enjoying it immensely. I tell you, dear fellow, someday you, too, shall make an arse of yourself over a little one, if not a woman, and then we shall all have the last laugh!" A

distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we “remember” our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

I can’t be the girl who brings her dog to therapy, it’s a slippery slope, one day I’m bringing my dog to therapy, the next, I’m pushing two sweater-clad pugs around in a baby carriage.

While Logan sat in the carriage, Drew and the baby entered the bordello, and for the second time that night, the place went ghostly quiet. Few babies patronized Gertie’s.

The baby belonged to Ma’s friend, Mrs Whitman. Mrs Whitman and the baby came to our house to visit. I wanted to play outside so Mrs Whitman said the baby could stay outside with me while she had coffee inside with Ma. I climbed up a tree. The baby sat in its carriage and watched me. I climbed down the tree.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it occurred to Republicans that they could lock in the religious vote by attaching themselves to the anti-choice movement. They abandoned the argument that abortion was an individual right and reframed the debate as one of the protection of fetal rights. The culture already treated women like vessels whose life purpose was the creation and carriage of babies. By prioritizing the welfare of fetuses, Republicans had turned women into second-class citizens and expendable ones at that.

The neon dust falls slowly, filtering through the stone canyons, settling on hats and fire hydrants, collecting on delicatessen awnings, filling the shopping carts and rickety baby carriages of the rag pickers with soft powdery snow.

Now, Tom had seemed like a decent guy when we watched him during track practice, and seeing that sign on the bulletin board had given us a clue that he had a good heart, too. But it was almost as if he knew we needed more convincing. And by the time we lost him—just a few streets away from our block—we were positive he couldn’t be the same guy who had robbed Speedy Jack’s. In fact, he turned out to be the nicest, most polite, most civic-minded boy I’ve ever seen. Here’s what we saw him do: He spotted a dog wandering into the road and stopped to coax it onto the sidewalk. He helped a little old lady across the street (really!), holding his hand up to stop traffic for her. He hopped off his skateboard and bent down to tie a child’s shoe. The mother (whose arms were full of groceries) looked like she wanted to hug him. He gave directions to a motorist, nodding politely at all her questions. He picked up litter from the sidewalk and threw it into a trash can. He stopped to admire a baby in its carriage. It was while he was cooing over the baby that Sunny gave me a disgusted look. “Are we wasting our time, or what?” she asked. I giggled. “Somehow I find it hard to believe he could swat a fly, much less hold up a store.” When Tom finished with the baby, he straightened up, stepped back onto his skateboard, and zipped around a corner. We let him go. Sunny sighed. “He’ll make some girl a fine husband one day,” she said, with a straight face. Then we cracked up. We were still laughing about it a half hour later, when Jill and Maggie showed up at Sunny’s for our party-planning session. We told them all about “Saint Tom,” as we’d begun to call him.

Most little girls don’t want to play with trucks, as almost any parent can attest. Including me: when my son gave his daughter Eliza a toy train, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep.

Our efforts to brace and strengthen the ceiling in the dark and dismal cellar of our home, with poles that were spaced about three feet apart, soon proved to be totally inadequate. We also fashioned window and door guards using scrap iron and steel as protection against the nightly rain of relentless horror by the bombings from above. Every time an air raid alarm sounded the five children and three women, living in this old building, stumbled down into the dark, damp basement. It was extremely difficult for one person to fit a baby carriage down the steep stairs and since my baby daughter’s pram was just too large for me to handle alone, I had to lift Ursula out of it and carry her down steep stairs to our makeshift subterranean pantry. The extreme cold of winter made the intolerable situation even worse. To care for little Ursula, my baby girl, I was forced to sit on the floor of this subterranean pantry. I can still remember the thick coarse material of the heavy coat I wore, as I crouched in what I thought was a protected corner, on the dirt floor. With the upturned collar of my heavy coat scratching my cheeks and uncertain of my surroundings, I fumbled and struggled in the dark and severe cold trying to burp, change and nurse my small, hungry child.

baby sat in its carriage and watched me.

I heard the footfalls, but it’s stopped now. It’s watching us, I can feel it.’ At that moment a small cloud passed over the moon and the world turned dark. ‘The moon will come out again soon.’ Centaine hugged the infant so hard that Shasa gave a little bleat of protest. ‘I’m sorry, baby.’ She relaxed her grip and then stumbled as she started forward. ‘I wish we hadn’t come – no, that’s not true. We had to come. We must be brave, Shasa. We can’t follow the spoor without the moon.’ She sank down to rest, looking up into the sky. The moon was a pale nimbus through the thin gunmetal cloud, and then it broke out into a hole in the cloud layer and for a moment flooded the glade with soft platinum light. ‘Shasa!’ Centaine’s voice rose into a high thin scream. There was something out there, a huge pale shape, as big as a horse, but with sinister, stealthy, unhorselike carriage. At her cry, it sank out of sight below the tops of the grass. Centaine leapt to her feet and raced towards the trees, but before she reached them the moon was snuffed out again, and in the darkness Centaine fell full length. Shasa wailed fretfully against her chest. ‘Please be quiet, baby.’ Centaine hugged him, but the child sensed her terror and screamed. ‘Don’t, Shasa. You’ll bring it after us.’ Centaine was trembling wildly. That big pale thing out there in the darkness was possessed of an unearthly menace, a palpable aura of evil, and she knew what it was. She had seen it before. She pressed herself flat to the earth, trying to cover Shasa with her own body. Then

…then I glimpsed a man wading back out into the river,” he was saying, “toward a half-submerged railway carriage with people trapped inside. And I said to myself, ‘That man is a hero. Also an idiot. Because he’s already been in the water for too long, and he won’t be able to save them, and he’s about to sacrifice his life for nothing.’ I proceeded to climb down the embankment and found Sutton. ‘Where is the earl?’ I asked.” West paused for dramatic effect, relishing the rapt attention of his audience. “And where do you think Sutton pointed? Out to the river, where that reckless fool had just saved a trio of children, and was wading after them with a baby in one arm and a woman on the other.” “The man was Lord Trenear?” one of the housemaids gasped. “None other.” The entire group exclaimed with pleasure and possessive pride. “Nothing to it, for a bloke as big as his lordship,” one of the footmen said with a grin. “I should think he’ll be put in the papers for this,” another exclaimed. “I hope so,” West said, “if only because I know how he would loathe it.” He paused as he saw Kathleen in the doorway. “All of you,” she said sotto voce to the servants, “had better clear out before Sims or Mrs. Church catches you in here.” “I was just reaching the best part,” West protested. “I’m about to describe my thrilling yet poignant rescue of the earl.” “You can describe it later,” Kathleen said, standing in the doorway as the servants hastily filed out. “For now, you should be resting.

The streets of downtown Shanghai likewise seemed a continuous freak circus at first, unbelievably alive with all manner of people performing almost every physical and social function in public: yelling, gesturing, always acting, crushing throngs spilling through every kind of traffic, precariously amidst old cars and new ones and between coolies racing wildly to compete for ricksha fares, gingerly past "honey-carts" filled with excrement dragged down Bubbling Well Road, sardonically past perfumed, exquisitely gowned, mid-thigh-exposed Chinese ladies, jestingly past the Herculean bare-backed coolie trundling his taxi-wheelbarrow load of six giggling servant girls en route to home or work, carefully before singing peddlers bearing portable kitchens ready with delicious noodles on the spot, lovingly under gold-lettered shops overflowing with fine silks and brocades, dead-panning past village women staring wide-eyed at frightening Indian policemen, gravely past gambling mah-jongg ivories clicking and jai alai and parimutuel betting, slyly through streets hung with the heavy-sweet acrid smell of opium, sniffingly past southern restaurants and bright-lighted sing-song houses, indifferently past scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course, snickeringly round elderly white gentlemen in carriages with their wives or Russian mistresses out for the cool air along the Bund, and hastily past sailors looking for beer and women—from noisy dawn to plangent night the endless hawking and spitting, the baby's urine stream on the curb, the amah's scolding, the high falsetto of opera at Wing On Gardens where a dozen plays went on at once and hotel rooms next door filled up with plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants in from the provinces for business and debauch, the wail of dance bands moaning for slender bejeweled Chinese taxi dancers, the whiteness of innumerable beggars and their naked unwashed infants, the glamour of the Whangpoo with its white fleets of foreign warships, its shaggy freighters, its fan-sailed junks, its thousand lantern-lit sampans darting fire-flies on the moon-silvered water filled with deadly pollution. Shanghai!