Grinding For My Family Quotes

...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.

The Voyager We are all lonely voyagers sailing on life's ebb tide, To a far off place were all stripling warriors have died, Sometime at eve when the tide is low, The voices call us back to the rippling water's flow, Even though our boat sailed with love in our hearts, Neither our dreams or plans would keep heaven far apart, We drift through the hush of God's twilight pale, With no response to our friendly hail, We raise our sails and search for majestic light, While finding company on this journey to the brighten our night, Then suddenly he pulls us through the reef's cutting sea, Back to the place that he asked us to be, Friendly barges that were anchored so sweetly near, In silent sorrow they drop their salted tears, Shall our soul be a feast of kelp and brine, The wasted tales of wishful time, Are we a fish on a line lured with bait, Is life the grind, a heartless fate, Suddenly, "HUSH", said the wind from afar, Have you not looked to the heavens and seen the new star, It danced on the abyss of the evening sky, The sparkle of heaven shining on high, Its whisper echoed on the ocean's spray, From the bow to the mast they heard him say, "Hope is above, not found in the deep, I am alive in your memories and dreams when you sleep, I will greet you at sunset and with the moon's evening smile, I will light your path home.. every last lonely mile, My friends, have no fear, my work was done well, In this life I broke the waves and rode the swell, I found faith in those that I called my crew, My love will be the compass that will see you through, So don't look for me on the ocean's floor to find, I've never left the weathered docks of your loving mind, For I am in the moon, the wind and the whale's evening song, I am the sailor of eternity whose voyage is not gone.

Trees, now—Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what’s happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. “That’s really insane.” He shakes his head. “There’s insanity in my family.” He looks up. The trees are still. They know he’s there. They probably also know what he’s thinking. “I’m sorry,” he tells them. “I can’t do anything about those people, they’re all out of my reach. What can I do?” A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, “Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn’t being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That’s what you can do.

I don’t want my children to obey only because they fear consequences or worry that Mom will lose it. I want to know their hearts understand and grasp the joy to be found in doing the right thing. This requires parenting through the daily grind with a long-term mentality.

This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

My dad says that if you love people and they love you back, and you’re happy for each other when things are good and help each other when things are bad, and you don’t even mind too much when people in-ev-it-a-bly—” she sounded out the word “—try to grind your gears, then it’s family. He says if you’re related to someone and they don’t treat you well, they don’t deserve to be called family, and you can meet someone as a total stranger and they can become the best family.

•I lost money in every way possible: I misplaced checks and sometimes found them when they were too old to take to the bank. If I did find them in time, I missed out on the interest they could’ve made in my savings account. I paid late fees on bills, even though I had money in the bank — I’d just forgotten to pay them or lost the bill in my piles. I bought new items because they were on sale with a rebate, but forgot to mail the rebate form. •I dealt with chronic health worries because I never scheduled doctor’s appointments. •I lived in constant fear of being “found out” by people who held me in high regard. I always felt others’ trust in me was misplaced. •I suffered from nonstop anxiety, waiting for the other shoe to drop. •I struggled to create a social life in our new home. I either felt I didn’t have time because I needed to catch up and calm some of the chaos, or I wasn’t organized enough to make plans in the first place. •I felt insecure in all my relationships, both personal and professional. •I had nowhere to retreat. My life was such a mess, I had no space to gather my thoughts or be by myself. Chaos lurked everywhere. •I rarely communicated with long-distance friends or family. •I wanted to write a book and publish articles in magazines, yet dedicated almost no time to my creative pursuits.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room. Throwing things near her but not exactly at her. I’m sure he told himself: I never hit her. I’m sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.

He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw out, giving him the look of a wounded , vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room. Throwing things near her but not exactly at her. I'm sure he told himself he never actually hit her. I'm sure because of his technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun. Don't make me turn this car around. Please, really, turn it around.

She reported that a member of Churchill’s inner circle, whom she did not identify, “has been to me and told me there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner.” She assured her husband that the source of this complaint was “a devoted friend,” with no ax to grind. Churchill’s private secretaries, she wrote, seemed to have resolved simply to take it and shrug it off. “Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming.” Hearing this shocked and hurt her, she said, “because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you.” Seeking to explain the degradation in Churchill’s behavior, the devoted friend had said, “No doubt it’s the strain.” But it was not just the friend’s observations that drove Clementine to write her letter. “My Darling Winston,” she began, “—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.” She cautioned that in possessing the power to give orders and to “sack anyone & everyone,” he was obliged to maintain a high standard of behavior—to “combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.” She reminded him that in the past he had been fond of quoting a French maxim, “On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme,” meaning, essentially, “One leads by calm.” She

The combination of these things opened up the door for Linda, or someone like her, to come in. Dan was scared to death of growing up and turning forty. Peter Pan wanted to stay a young, carefree, party-boy forever, and maybe, too, he was finally cool enough to feel part of a fraternity, like the ones he hadn’t been a part of in College. Albeit his fraternity brothers were all middle-aged men with families of their own, but that’s just semantics. It’s the spirit, or in this case the spirits, of the thing that counts. We had four children and there I was, an ever-present figure expecting him to act his age and show responsibility, and I suppose from his point of view that was grinding. I’ve always said that Linda just filled the bar stool I didn’t want to sit in anymore. We weren’t twenty, and as far as I was concerned our days of hanging out at Henny’s over Irish coffees, just because, were long gone. I had piano lessons and soccer games and orthodontist appointments, and Linda didn’t have any of those. She was available after work to sit beside him in bars and laugh at his jokes and gaze at him like he was a superhero. As for me, I didn’t have the time or the inclination anymore to be that girl for him again. He was my husband and I was his wife, and we had children, and as wonderful as being young and drunk and free with it all before you is, I still thought that being grown up and part of a family with them all around you was even better. Dan obviously felt differently and Linda was right there to remind him that you don’t always have to be an adult, you don’t always have to do what’s right, and sometimes it’s okay to just do what you want. That was her sales pitch and Dan was a very interested buyer.

I have talked to many people about this and it seems to be a kind of mystical experience. The preparation is unconscious, the realization happens in a flaming second. It was on Third Avenue. The trains were grinding over my head. The snow was nearly waist-high in the gutters and uncollected garbage was scattered in a dirty mess. The wind was cold, and frozen pieces of paper went scraping along the pavement. I stopped to look in a drug-store window where a latex cooch dancer was undulating by a concealed motor–and something burst in my head, a kind of light and a kind of feeling blended into an emotion which if it had spoken would have said, “My God! I belong here. Isn’t this wonderful?” Everything fell into place. I saw every face I passed. I noticed every doorway and the stairways to apartments. I looked across the street at the windows, lace curtains and potted geraniums through sooty glass. It was beautiful–but most important, I was part of it. I was no longer a stranger. I had become a New Yorker. Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city. A young man in a small town, a frog in a small puddle, if he kicks his feet is able to make waves, get mud in his neighbor’s eyes–make some impression. He is known. His family is known. People watch him with some interest, whether kindly or maliciously. He comes to New York and no matter what he does, no one is impressed. He challenges the city to fight and it licks him without being aware of him. This is a dreadful blow to a small-town ego. He hates the organism that ignores him. He hates the people who look through him. And then one day he falls into place, accepts the city and does not fight it any more. It is too huge to notice him and suddenly the fact that it doesn’t notice him becomes the most delightful thing in the world. His self-consciousness evaporates. If he is dressed superbly well–there are half a million people dressed equally well. If he is in rags–there are a million ragged people. If he is tall, it is a city of tall people. If he is short the streets are full of dwarfs; if ugly, ten perfect horrors pass him in one block; if beautiful, the competition is overwhelming. If he is talented, talent is a dime a dozen. If he tries to make an impression by wearing a toga–there’s a man down the street in a leopard skin. Whatever he does or says or wears or thinks he is not unique. Once accepted this gives him perfect freedom to be himself, but unaccepted it horrifies him. I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters–in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it–once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else….

True understanding is to see the events of life in this way: “You are here for my benefit, though rumor paints you otherwise.” And everything is turned to one’s advantage when he greets a situation like this: You are the very thing I was looking for. Truly whatever arises in life is the right material to bring about your growth and the growth of those around you. This, in a word, is art—and this art called “life” is a practice suitable to both men and gods. Everything contains some special purpose and a hidden blessing; what then could be strange or arduous when all of life is here to greet you like an old and faithful friend? I had a dream many years ago that sums up this thought in a different way, one that has become a sustaining metaphor for me. I am on a train going home to God. (Bear with me!) It’s a long journey, and everything that happens in my life is scenery along the way. Some of it is beautiful; I want to linger over it awhile, perhaps hold on to it or even try to take it with me. Other parts of the journey are spent grinding through a barren, ugly countryside. Either way the train moves on. And pain comes whenever I cling to the scenery, beautiful or ugly, rather than accept that all the scenery is grist for the mill, containing, as Marcus Aurelius counseled us, some hidden purpose and a hidden blessing. My family, of course, is on board with me. Beyond our families, we choose who is on the train with us, who we share our journey with. The people we invite on the train are those with whom we are prepared to be vulnerable and real, with whom there is no room for masks and games. They strengthen us when we falter and remind us of the journey’s purpose when we become distracted by the scenery. And we do the same for them. Never let life’s Iagos—flatterers, dissemblers—onto your train. We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear, but we are often too busy to notice. When you realize they’ve made it on board, make sure you usher them off the train; and as soon as you can, forgive them and forget them. There is nothing more draining than holding grudges.

I had worked just as hard as I knew how to be the new and squeaky-clean straight-arrow family man I was supposed to be, and at each attempt I had been slapped down, sneered at, and utterly crushed. Irritation grew inside me and morphed into anger, and then that started to change, too, as I felt a cold and acid bath of contempt burble up inside: contempt for Brian, and Rita, and Deborah, and Cody and Astor, for all the dribbling idiots in the whole stumble-footed world— —and most of all, contempt for me, Dexter the Dummkopf, who wanted to walk in the sunlight, smelling the flowers and watching rainbows curl across the rose-tinted sky. But I had forgotten that the sun is nearly always hidden by clouds, flowers have thorns, and rainbows are always out of reach. You could dream the impossible dream all you wanted to, but it was always gone when you woke up. I was finding that out the hard way, each new reminder grinding my nose further and further into the dirt, and now all I really wanted was to grab something by the throat and squeeze— The

Don’t underestimate your own value, dummy,” he says. I stiffen. I hate that word. Absolutely hate it. He stiffens when I do. “What?” he asks. “What’s wrong?” “Don’t ever call me a dummy, Logan,” I say, my teeth grinding together so hard they hurt. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” he rushes to say. He takes my face in his hands, holding it tightly as he looks into my eyes. “I didn’t mean it.” He chuckles, but there’s no mirth in the sound. “It’s a term of endearment in our family. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Really, I didn’t. I don’t think you’re stupid. You have a learning disability, but you’re not stupid. I know that.” I wish I knew it. He sounds so sure about it. “It’s all right,” I say, but I’m already pushing back from him. “Don’t pull away from me,” he warns. That makes me laugh. “I’m not the one who’s always pulling away, Logan,” I remind him. I push him back again, but he’s not having any of it. Suddenly, his hands clutch my bottom, and he hoists me up onto the bathroom countertop. “Forgive me,” he says. I nod, and he kisses the corners of my eyes where tears have formed. That word hurts me. It always has. And it was the final straw that made me leave my parents’ house. That word and others like it—I’ve heard them for too long.

I wasn’t quite sure if I had been left out to dry by my family. A part of me was angry and felt betrayed.

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long.

You are carrying Luis Philippe's child," he stated without preamble. The name did not sound strange on this man's tongue, but it took Lily a moment to respond to it. She merely nodded her head in reply. She had a feeling she would need to save her voice for what would follow. "I had hoped my grandson would find a wife among his own people." Antonio took a bedroom chair but continued to hold himself stiffly upright. Lily lifted an inquiring brow. His own people? Had the man forgotten that Cade was equally Indian? Antonio scowled at her response. "Among my people. It would be easier to show that he is a de Suela if he had married appropriately." This man had come here with an axe to grind, and nothing she could say would stop him. Why waste her voice in trying? She reached for the shawl on her bedside stand and wrapped it around her. Her silence forced de Suela to realize he left her no room for comment. "He tells me you are a wealthy lady in your own right. I should not complain. I apologize. I am an old man and have come to realize that many of my dreams will never come true. For many years I have wished for a child to carry on my name, but I thought it was not to be. Now that I have found my grandson, I wish him to be everything that I would have made of him. I forget that he is already a man of his own." "Very much so," Lily whispered, finally hearing something with which she could agree. Antonio nodded. "I think you are a good woman. We will make the family see that you are one of us, as they must come to see that Luis is mine. It is good that he takes my name. The child you carry will be a de Suela. Luis has done the right thing by bringing you here. I am not so old that there is not time to see my destiny passed on to my grandson and his child." Lily felt a flicker of alarm, but the old man was already rising, and the shakiness of his hand on the stick prevented her from protesting aloud.

Dashing by Maisie Aletha Smikle On my farm I keep a firearm The deer I charm And then disarm To feed my family venison And stay away from medicine Sheep so sweet We love to eat Young lambs we chop To get lamb chops Pigs in wigs Dished their wigs to do a jig Pigs skinny dip Floated and strip So turkey chicken and rabbit May be covered with bacon strips Cows roaming in the valleys Cats left in the Alleys Bring the cows It's time to chow Beef for steak Make no mistake Mince it grind it chop it We must have it We plant dashene To cook and steam To feed the animals so they keep lean Fit and ready to consume Eat we must Or we'd be dust Knead the dough for the pie crust Get the pan it will not rust We will dine Without wine We will roast eat then toast Thanking God that He is our Host

Sometimes such hopelessness cannot be described in words. My blood pressure rises in frustration. The mind becomes infected with sadness. Life is a boat without oars. Where we will drop anchor nobody knows. After years of drifting abroad to make the family happy, some will never get satisfaction themselves. Neither is the family pleased. Sometimes it's surreal to watch, an empty book of sighs. If the unwanted pain makes us cry, there's no echo because it's emptiness everywhere. There are no perfect walls, so the scream goes and goes and never comes back. I feel like a stranger to myself. Once again, we start over the daily grind.

No, life has no soundtrack, just the daily grind occasionally alleviated by short-lived bursts of happiness—a vacation, the birth of a child, retirement. This is my life and the life of everyone I know—all my friends, all my family members, everyone with whom I have more than a passing acquaintance. I’ve spent nearly forty-five years on this planet, and the majority of those years—my adult years, my reality-based years—have shown me that the adventure Molly and John had no longer exists. This is why I so want Molly to wake up and tell me that I’m wrong.

Days in a house with children grind by like glaciers, but the years rush by like wind.

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

I started telling myself that I enjoyed my work. I proclaimed that I enjoyed every single aspect of my creative endeavors—the agony and the ecstasy, the success and the failure, the joy and the embarrassment, the dry spells and the grind and the stumble and the confusion and the stupidity of it all. I even dared to say this aloud. I told the universe (and anyone who would listen) that I was committed to living a creative life not in order to save the world, not as an act of protest, not to become famous, not to gain entrance to the canon, not to challenge the system, not to show the bastards, not to prove to my family that I was worthy, not as a form of deep therapeutic emotional catharsis . . . but simply because I liked it. So try saying this: “I enjoy my creativity.” And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it.

The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don’t live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion—and even total frivolousness. Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, “It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here—have some delights.” It

When Paul drank more than a diabetic should or we argued about petty domestic things, I would employ a kind of preemptive nostalgia, filing the episodes away under the heading A Couple's Early Years. This general retrospective of the present leaped ahead to forgive our moments of anger and doubt, and the occasional day when the frustration and recriminations between us became grinding. It helped alleviate my sense of having been duped into believing Paul would be the person to deliver me from my family, rather than imitate it. And really it was okay, and most often better than that, being the object of his desire, sensing he would never leave me. That we were safe.

This, I realized suddenly, was friendship. You didn’t always agree, and you both might do things the other person wished you didn’t, but it didn’t mean things came to a grinding halt. It didn’t mean you stopped being friends. You got over it, and you moved on. Maybe most people worked this out earlier in life, but this was a revelation for me. In my family, there had been no room for error.

Our creaturely existence is registered, measured, discussed, and represented in increasingly abstract terms. Maybe this helps explain how someone like me, who should know better, can forget he's an islander. Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea, Australia the economic enterprise. There's no denying the power of these conceits. I've been shaped by them. But they are hardly the only forces at work. I'm increasingly mindful of the degree to which geography, distance, and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations. The island continent has not been mere background. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family. Like many Australians, I feel this tectonic grind - call it a familial ache - most keenly abroad.

So I attacked their excesses by telling very simply the story of my great-grandfather and his beloved pipe. Grandpa Phossie, we called him, which means Grandpa Beard. I told of the hardships he’d undergone in Bohemia and how he had made his way to the United States. I related in pithy detail how he had built a home for his family with the sweat of his brow. Now he had little time left in life and few pleasures beyond throwing a stick for his little dog to fetch and looking into the swirls of smoke from his ancient pipe to recall scenes from happier days. “Who among you,” I asked, “would deprive that whitebearded old man of one of his last comforts on earth, his beloved pipe?” I was delighted to note that there were tears in the eyes of some of the girls in the auditorium as I finished. I wished my father could have heard that applause. It might have made up for some of his disappointment in my lack of scholastic interest. As

Another judgment I made early in the game and enforced through the years was that there would be no pay telephones, no jukeboxes, no vending machines of any kind in McDonald’s restaurants. Many times operators have been tempted by the side income some of these machines offer, and they have questioned my decision. But I’ve stood firm. All of those things create unproductive traffic in a store and encourage loitering that can disrupt your customers. This would downgrade the family image we wanted to create for McDonald’s. Furthermore, in some areas the vending machines were controlled by the crime syndicate, and I wanted no part of that. Our

But on a deeper level, collapse was an option. Letting my business fall apart was a real possibility. Beyond the surface of managing bills and trying to stay on top of the daily grind, I made a choice, a conscious choice, that even though my world had turned upside down, the girls and I were going to survive this. Because, for me, letting my family fall apart was not on the table. I would not run, move, or give up, like many urged or predicted. I went back to my Thoughtfully Fit training plan. Guided by the sticky notes and years of success in making other people’s lives work, I became ground zero to test-drive my new model, to help me be Thoughtfully Fit through this crisis.

Michelle, the girls, and I visited a sprawling favela on the western end of Rio, where we dropped in at a youth center to watch a capoeira troupe perform and I kicked a soccer ball around with a handful of local kids. By the time we were leaving, hundreds of people had massed outside the center, and although my Secret Service detail nixed the idea of me taking a stroll through the neighborhood, I persuaded them to let me step through the gate and greet the crowd. Standing in the middle of the narrow street, I waved at the Black and brown and copper-toned faces; residents, many of them children, clustered on rooftops and small balconies and pressed against the police barricades. Valerie, who was traveling with us and witnessed the whole scene, smiled as I walked back inside, saying, “I’ll bet that wave changed the lives of some of those kids forever.” I wondered if that was true. It’s what I had told myself at the start of my political journey, part of my justification to Michelle for running for president—that the election and leadership of a Black president stood to change the way children and young people everywhere saw themselves and their world. And yet I knew that whatever impact my fleeting presence might have had on those children of the favelas and however much it might cause some to stand straighter and dream bigger, it couldn’t compensate for the grinding poverty they encountered every day: the bad schools, polluted air, poisoned water, and sheer disorder that many of them had to wade through just to survive. By my own estimation, my impact on the lives of poor children and their families so far had been negligible—even in my own country. My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor, both at home and abroad, from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up their ranks or eliminate whatever slippery foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate that might lead to a deadly flood or storm; or, in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets. That wasn’t nothing, I thought—as long as I didn’t start fooling myself into thinking it was anywhere close to enough.

He was not a secret DAS agent or a senator snorting paramilitary money or a good machito grinding corn for arepas on Sundays for his family. Homeboy was there and then he wasn’t. Nevertheless, Myriam del Socorro Juan, a.k.a La Mami Mayor, took it to heart to tattoo the pain all over her face as a reminder that my dad was an asshole.

Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited. And we’re either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like I did with my brother, or we’re absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. I’m in suicide prevention now. I’ve had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. I had one community I was working with recently in South Dakota tell me they were grieved out. That was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. But how do we instill in our children the will to live? At these conferences. And in the offices. In the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. Or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. I’m sorry. I get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, I’m not sorry, this issue shouldn’t be met with politeness or formality. We can’t get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. We choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. We are choosing for them. All the time. That’s what these kids are feeling. They have no control. Guess what kinda control they do have? We need to be about what we’re always saying we’re about. And if we can’t, and we’re really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who’ll really do something, let them come in and help. Fuck all the rest.

Tell me honestly’ he says. ‘Do I look my age?’ Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words ‘Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother’. To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans — an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair…. Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.

In proficient English, Samira explained that her current job for the United Nations was to represent women who had been raped by Taliban militia. The leaders of the militia wanted to kill Samira because of her faith in Christ and because of her attempts to hold them accountable in a United Nations court of law. She had personally led more than thirty women to Christ, baptized them, and was now discipling them. She had done all of this in an environment nearly devoid of male believers who might be able to lend her protection. I listened in amazement as she shared the story of her own spiritual pilgrimage. The Lord was obviously using her in a powerful way. By the time she and I met, Samira’s superiors were already seeking to extradite Samira to the United States—for her own protection. I begged her to stay among her own people because I couldn’t see how God could replace this young woman of faith in such a dark and difficult place. However, the slow-grinding, irreversible gears of international diplomacy had already been set in motion. Samira was whisked out of Central Asia and flown immediately to the American Midwest where she began to make a new life. When I arrived home from my trip, I told Ruth all about this remarkable young woman. We arranged to fly her from her new home to Kentucky for a visit. She spent a week in our home. We took Samira to a moderate-sized church in central Kentucky for Sunday morning worship. It just so happened that there was a baptism service scheduled for that morning; an entire family—mother, father, and two children—were to be baptized. As their baptism progressed—with this young lady believer from a Muslim background sitting in the pew between Ruth and me—I noticed Samira beginning to fidget, twisting, turning, and rocking backward and forward. It was as if she was having an anxiety attack. In a quiet whisper, I asked her if there was something wrong. Samira tugged on the sleeve of my jacket. She whispered forcefully in my ear: “I cannot believe this! I cannot believe that I have lived long enough to see people being baptized in public. An entire family together! No one is shooting at them, no one is threatening them, no one will go to prison, no one will be tortured, and no one will be killed. And they are being openly and freely baptized as a family! I never dreamed that God could do such things! I never believed that I would live to see a miracle like this.

Grinding may look easy, and it is, for the first ten minutes. To grind a quantity of grain, though, as I found out when I tried, takes skill, control, physical strength, and time. I was quickly panting, sweaty, and dizzy, my hair in my eyes, and the mano slipping at awkward angles. Grinding is hard on the knees, hips, back, shoulders, and elbows, causing arthritis and bone damage. Grinding is lonely, too exhausting to allow for chatter. Kneeling to grind with the breasts swinging can be seen as submissive, demeaning, and sexually provocative, as lascivious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Mexican women grinding make clear. The heavy labor was relegated to women, convicts, and slaves, called “grinding slaves” in the technical language of seventh-century English court documents.42 Even today Mexican women in remote villages grind five hours daily to prepare enough maize for a family of five or six. For generation upon generation of grinders in the bread-eating parts of the world, the author of Genesis (3:19) had it nailed. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Sweet as, eh.” “Do you mean where you wrap your wrists?” Hannah wondered. “Do you write things on there, then?” “Most of the boys do. Especially the ones with families,” Hemi explained. “Got the names of their partners, their kids on there. Reminds them who they’re playing for.” “You play for your kids and your wife?” Hannah asked. “What does that mean, exactly?” “Hannah’s dad died when she was young,” Drew told Hemi. “These sorts of things are a bit of a mystery to her.” “My wife and my kids give me the incentive to go out and play well. They’re my inspiration,” Hemi said, taking Reka’s hand. “Not sure it works that way with women.” “I’ve been working for a long time,” Hannah mused. “But even though I had some responsibility for my brother and sister,” she said, ignoring Drew’s snort at her description, “I never thought of myself as working for them. It was separate. If anything, I have to admit, it felt more like a conflict. Almost a burden, trying to think about them and also about everything else I had to do. Trying to juggle everything. It doesn’t feel that way for you? Like a...an extra weight? The responsibility?” Hemi shook his head firmly. “Maybe men need something beyond themselves to remind us that it’s not all about us. Reckon we’re more selfish. We need somebody to work for. In my case, somebody to play for. When we’re busting a gut, trying to grind out a win, and I’m feeling ready to chuck it in, I look down at my kids’ names, at Reka’s name. And it reminds me, this is why I’m doing this. Gives me strength.” “Wow,” Hannah said quietly. “I never knew that.

Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person-a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief-you may begin to feel less trust worthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals-rats and monkeys, for example-that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And-what is especially relevant here-they avoid fighting even in self-defense. Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us-to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done.

If you already hate tofu, the term "tofu skin" is probably an effective emetic. But this stuff is addictive. You start by making fresh soy milk. I'm not going to soft-pedal how much work this is: you have to soak, grind, squeeze, and simmer dried soybeans. The result is a thick milk entirely unlike the soy milk you get in a box at Whole Foods in the same way Parmigiano-Reggiano is unlike Velveeta. Then, to make tofu skins (yuba in Japanese), you simmer the soy milk gently over low heat until a skin forms on the surface, then pluck it off with your fingers and drape it over a chopstick to dry. It is exactly like the skin that forms on top of pudding, the one George Costanza wanted to market as Pudding Skin Singles. Yuba doesn't look like much- like a pile of discarded raw chicken skin, honestly. But the texture is toothsome, and with each bite you're rewarded with the flavor of fresh soy milk. It's best served with just a few drops of soy sauce and maybe some grated ginger or sliced negi. "I'm kind of obsessed with tofu skins right now," said Iris, poking her head into the fridge to grab a round of yuba. Me too. In Seattle, I had to buy, grind, boil, and otherwise toil for a few sheets of yuba. In Tokyo, I found it at Life Supermarket, sold in a single-serving plastic tub with a foil top. The yuba wasn't as snappy or flavorful as homemade, but it had that characteristic fresh-soy aroma, which to me smells like a combination of "healthy forest" and "clean baby." Iris and I ate it greedily. (The yuba, not the baby.) Yuba isn't technically tofu, because the soy milk isn't coagulated. Japanese tofu comes in two basic categories, much like underpants: cotton (momen) and silken (kinugoshi). Cotton tofu is the kind eaten most commonly in the U.S.; if you buy a package of extra-firm tofu and cut it up for stir-frying, that's definitely cotton tofu. Silken tofu is fragile, creamier and more dairy-like than cotton-tofu, and it's the star of my favorite summer tofu dish. Hiya yakko is cubes of tofu, usually silken, drizzled with soy sauce and judiciously topped with savory bits: grated ginger or daikon, bonito flakes, negi. It's popular in Japanese bars and easy to make at home, which I did, with (you will be shocked to hear) tons of fresh negi.

lanes. The mill wheel on the horizon turning its daily grind as chimneys breathed tendrils of smoke into the Wiltshire sky and smartly attired gentlemen played cricket on the Barley Field. Nothing now. Not even the distant din of agricultural equipment ploughing the fields. Just silence. Heavy. Oppressive. I glimpsed something then, a quick movement at the very edge of my field of vision. There were enough trees in the churchyard; it might easily have been a branch stirring on the wind . . . I looked to the great elm tree at the far end of the churchyard and saw, in the shadow cast by its overhanging branches, an ornate memorial stone fashioned from smooth white marble in the shape of a lamb. On either side of the lamb were two stone urns. Something told me there was only one family in Imber who could have afforded such a monument. With weather-worn angels looming on all sides of me, I crossed the churchyard to examine the impressive monument, and wasn’t surprised to find I was right. IN LOVING MEMORY OF PIERRE HOWISON HARTWELL APRIL 1925 – OCTOBER 1930

He seemed surprised to hear from me now, his tone holding a note of shock. “Saint, how are you? What can I do for you?” “Kenneth. I just heard about the new volunteer counselor. I was hoping to get a copy of his credentials. As you know, the situation with some of the kids is pretty tenuous and new people scare them,” I said. “Oh! Didn’t you know he was coming? He said he had been approved months ago but he had delayed his start date due to traveling out of state for a family death. His name is Roland Cunningham. He’s been a high school counselor for fifteen years and now he’s semi-retired and wants to give back. He says that he saw so many gay kids who needed an ear.” I rolled my eyes so hard I almost hurt myself and Rio frowned at me questioningly. I shook my head and pulled in one deep breath before I spoke. “No, he hasn’t been approved for months. I’ve never heard of him. I suspect he’s a spy who belongs to Clay Greene.” I could hear Kenneth suck air, then chuckle disbelievingly. “Oh, no, Saint. That’s impossible. He had a copy of a volunteer application that you signed and dated in January. You probably just forgot, I know you’ve had a lot on your mind with your sister and everything.” I heard him click his tongue and had to work to not reach through the phone and wring his neck. “He’s going to make sure the kids have someone else to talk to. Don’t worry about it, I’m taking care of everything.” Rio’s frown had morphed into mild alarm, and I wasn’t sure what my face was doing that was causing it but whatever it was must have been interesting. He edged closer as I took several deep breaths. “Kenneth. Listen to me. You need to be cautious. Have you seen the security reports from Mr. Rao? Did make sure you let him know about this Cunningham? Did you run the background check?” “I glanced through the reports, yes, but no, I didn’t tell him about Roland. Mr. Rao is the night guard and Roland is scheduled for afternoons.” He chuckled lightly. “I didn’t see the overlap.” I did not grind my teeth, but it was a near thing. Rio hovered, not touching me, which I was grateful for. Once I got off this phone I was going to go off. “What about the background check, Ken? You know the background check policy.” “Oh, yes,” Kenneth said. “We did the background check. Completely clean, exemplary record with several awards from his career. Really, you need to calm down. I have it all under control.” “Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll let you get back to it then, Ken. Thank you.” I hung up before Kenneth could reply and Rio looked at me warily. “I am going to have him kicked off the board so fast his fucking head is going to spin. Shouldn’t be too hard, it’s full of ball bearings and broken gravel,” I snarled. “So that didn’t go well,” Rio observed quietly. He was still hovering, clearly unsure of how best to handle me.