Lakeside Quotes

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

It faded slowly, ebbing like the tide. He rolled onto his back, staring up, his head still aching. The black clouds were beginning to roll back, showing a widening strip of blue; the Angel was gone, the lake surging under the growing light as if the water were boiling. Simon began to sit up slowly, his eyes squinted painfully against the sun. He could see someone racing down the path from the farmhouse to the lake. Someone with long black hair, and a purple jacket that flew out behind her like wings. She hit the end of the path and leaped onto the lakeside, her boots kicking up puffs of sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself sand behind her. She reached him and threw herself down, wrapping her arms around him. “Simon,” she whispered. He could feel the strong, steady beat of Isabelle’s heart. “I thought you were dead,” she went on. “I saw you fall down, and—I thought you were dead.” Simon let her hold him, propping himself up on his hands. He realized he was listing like a ship with a hole in the side, and tried not to move. He was afraid that if he did, he would fall over. “I am dead.” “ I know,” Izzy snapped. “I mean more dead than usual.

She'd heard enough regrets in her lifetime to know that dreams don't always die because of something terrible, but more often because of something that's merely acceptable.

The warehouse was a part of the wharves down at the lakeside, and even the chill waters of Lake Michigan were warmer than usual. They filled the air with more than the average water-scent of mud and mildew and eau de dead fishy.

Do you know what happened to the dinosaurs? The Others is what happened to the dinosaurs. A joke Captain Burke had told him his first day on the job in Lakeside. Except it wasn’t a joke. Burke had known that, at least to some degree. And now so did he.

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

People here liked to say they rooted for the underdog, but some of them got real quiet when the underdog was different from them.

Who we are and where we want to go determines what we do now and what we accomplish over time.

of his lakeside shack A watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent, Emerged with his uneasy dog and went Along the reedy bank. He came too late.

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to & now I have a choice repair a world or build a new one inside my body a white door opens into a place queerly brimming gold light so velvet-gold it is like the world hasn’t happened when I call out all my friends are there everyone we love is still alive gathered at the lakeside like constellations my honeyed kin honeyed light beneath the sky a garden blue stalks white buds the moon’s marble glow the fire distant & flickering the body whole bright- winged brimming with the hours of the day beautiful nameless planet. Oh friends, my friends— bloom how you must, wild until we are free.

There is no playing it safe when it comes to love; it's a contact sport for your heart.

He has a way of making me feel like I'm the only girl he sees.

All I want to do is go back to my apartment, cocoon myself inside a cozy blanket, and watch Love Island while eating a pint of cookie dough ice cream.

Ned had no clue how any parent could live a life without regret. Like most parents, he just had to choose which regrets he could live with.

It reminded him of college life, how you could see most of someone's possessions all at once in a single room, defiantly asserting a personality.

What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world.

Was mache ich hier eigentlich?", fragte Shadow. "In Lakeside, meine ich. Nicht auf der Welt im Allgemeinen.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame

I sit on a foldaway chair at the lakeside, sipping hot cocoa and admiring the sunset behind distant clouds, pondering my next novel, which will be more truth than fiction. More memoir than tale. It will begin at the Third Garden and end here at Little Loch Broom, floating on a leaf over clear water, a bared soul visible to all those who would desire a glimpse of a childhood most extraordinary.

San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.... They may share certain cultural signifiers - money, a federal government, entertainment; it's the same land, obviously - but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country is are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat. She disappeared beyond the lakeside willows. A flock of small birds rose up and passed back over him with thin calls.

As well as the [League of Nations] delegates themselves and their suites, there were innumerable campaigners of one sort and another, male and female, clerical and lay, young and old; all with some notion to publicise, some pet solution to offer, some organisation to promote. They gathered in droves, fanning out through the city, and settling in hotels and pensions, from the Lakeside ones down to tiny obscure back-street establishments. Ferocious ladies with moustaches, clergymen with black leather patches on the elbows of their jackets or cassocks and smelling of tobacco smoke, mad admirals who knew where to find the lost tribes of Israel, and scarcely saner generals who deduced prophetic warnings from the measurement of the pyramids; but one and all believers in the League's historic role to deliver mankind painlessly and inexpensively from the curse of war to the great advantage of all concerned.

At This Moment Of Time Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear The Ace of Spades. They fear Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece, Sweet with decision. And they distrust The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft, Then the colored lights, rising. Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume Greedily Caesar at the prow returning, Locked in the stone of his act and office. While the brass band brightly bursts over the water They stand in the crowd lining the shore Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes Are haunted by water Disturb me, compel me. It is not true That "no man is happy," but that is not The sense which guides you. If we are Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream), You are exact. You tug my sleeve Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship, And I remember that we who move Are moved by clouds that darken midnight

London and New York, and the hire car’s Sat Nav told her she had driven 252 miles since leaving the airport. A whole ocean and half a state lay between her and Tom. She should have been upset but instead she felt numb. Back in the UK it was four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon and she wondered what Tom was doing, then grimaced as she pictured him pottering around the house in his jogging bottoms and t-shirt. He would no doubt have called her closest friends, all innocence, asking if they knew where she was. How long would it take him to work out she had flown to America to look for the lakeside cabin she’d inherited from her great-

When we see too many battlefields, it breaks something inside of a person and they lose the ability to distinguish between cruelty and necessity.

After all, the risk has always been part of his appeal.

the only thing worse than restaurant work was the ceaseless, unpaid childcare inflicted upon an older sister.

It's lonely, to no feel like other, to not experience their apparent ease or success.

This place is in your blood, but not your heart. Go find a place that is.

There's something that happens to the newly displaced. Whatever power or choice that was stripped away in the process of reluctantly leaving one's homeland is fervently reclaimed in other situations, and honing in on the best spot to sit and enjoy a meal, be it at a restaurant or a lakeside, takes on the utmost importance. . . . If nothing else, we were always prepared for any and all circumstances and with plenty of provisions to see us through.

One thing she’d learned over the last year was that no matter what your plans were for your life, God or the universe or maybe even your guardian angels might present a much better plan for you if you stayed open to the possibilities.

Winter was her cathedral, and the snow-decked trees its endless pillars, and although it was quiet, it wasn't empty. The silence coaxed voices into her imagination, voices of the past and future, voices of animals and people both common and divine.

If you were to ask the developers of Lakeside or any shopping center what they are offering consumers (formerly known as “people”) they’d say, “It’s all under one roof”—great, a ceiling, and, more importantly, “choice.” Choice is the key. Apparently, then, what excited me as a bulimic Smiths fan and onanist was the possibility of choice, and for anybody to be stimulated by the idea of choice, the precondition must be a lack of choice. Which is a way of saying a lack of power, a lack of freedom.

But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him. Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn't recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

...had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies: a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success. Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination. Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face.

He’d fly his chopper over the Berlin lakeside beaches, for example, throwing out leaflets that read, “The handsome young man flying this helicopter is Captain Dale Le Clerc. If you would like to meet him in person, ring him at…” with, of course, his phone number and the best time to call. These things would flutter, en masse, onto the tanned bellies of the West Berlin sunbathers, and the results were mind-boggling. Once I went back to his apartment with him, only to find a line of girls waiting patiently at his door, all of them ready to live the day

It's almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside," he said. Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, "It's not. San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis." "Is that so?" said Shadow, mildly. "Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers - money, a federal government, entertainment; it's the same land, obviously - but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald's.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly. I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way. But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats. There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry it's such a lousy story.

I . . . hurried to the city library to find out the true age of Chicago. City library! After all, it cannot be anything but Chicagoesque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as everything in Chicago is great in size and wealth. Its million books are filling all the shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good dinner, even ice cream, but—where is the table? The Chicago city library has no solemnly quiet, softly peaceful reading-room; you are like a god who made a perfect man and forgot to put in the soul; the books are worth nothing without having a sweet corner and plenty of time, as the man is nothing without soul. Throw those books away, if you don't have a perfect reading-room! Dinner is useless without a table. I want to read a book as a scholar, as I want to eat dinner as a gentleman. What difference is there, my dearest Chicago, between your honourable library and the great department store, an emporium where people buy things without a moment of selection, like a busy honey bee? The library is situated in the most annoyingly noisy business quarter, under the overhanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan who was born without taste of the fresh air and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill-smelling air of Chicago almost kills me sometimes. What a foolishness and absurdity of the city administrators to build the office of learning in such place of restaurants and barber shops! Look at that edifice of the city library! Look at that white marble! That's great, admirable; that means tremendous power of money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, outward display, what an entire lacking of fine sentiment and artistic love! Ah, those decorations with gold and green on the marble stone spoil the beauty! What a shame! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you?

Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir-crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.

The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of the country’s cruelest climates (with roof-topping lake-effect snowfalls drowning the city each winter) to live in and around Buffalo is testimony to the wisdom of Judge Wilkeson and the city fathers of 1825 in doing all the persuading, as well as dredging and prettifying the banks of Buffalo Creek.

Like I told you, you are the way you are,' Dr. Eaton said. 'There's nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs help sometimes. You just needed help with this.' She could never hear those sentences enough. It's lonely, to not feel like others, to not experience their apparent ease or success. For the first time, Mariel felt ashamed that she'd tried to hide what she viewed as a deficiency. It was the shame that was isolating, not the need for support.

A short, older man stepped up to me, sticking out his hand and saying something I couldn't hear. Thinking, "Now who's this?" I took out one of my ear monitors and said, "Sorry, I couldn't hear you." He spoke again, smiling, "Hello, I'm Charlie Watts." "Oh!" I said, taken aback, "Hello." And I shook his hand. He asked if we were going on soon, and I said yes, any minute, and he said, with a twinkle, "I'm going to watch you!" I suppose if I could have felt more pressured, that might have done it, but I was already at maximum intensity — there was no time to think of Charlie Watts and the Rolling Stones, watching them on The T.A.M.I. Show or "Ed Sullivan" when I was twelve-and-a-half, hearing "Satisfaction" snarling down the midway at Lakeside Park, Gimme Shelter at the cinema in London, listening to Charlie's beautiful solo album, Warm and Tender, so many times late at night in Quebec, or any of the other million times Charlie Watts and his band had been part of my life.

I always thought of foxglove as a flower of the woods — deep in the shade, beloved of the bumble bee and little people. But the foxgloves of the Ness are a quite different breed. Strident purple in the yellow broom, they stand exposed to wind and blistering sunshine, as rigid as guardsmen on parade. There they are at the edge of the lakeside, standing to attention, making a splash — no blushing violets these, and not in ones or twos but hundreds, proud regiments marching in the summer, with clash of cymbals and rolling drums. Here comes June. Glorious, colourful June. ~ The foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, folksglove, or fairyglove — whose speckles and freckles are the marks of elves' fingers, is also called dead man's fingers. It contains the poison Digitalis, first used by a Dr. Withering in the 18th century to cure heart disease. Foxglove is hardly mentioned in older herbals — Gerard says, it has no use in medicine, being hot and dry and bitter. The 'glove' comes from the Anglo-Saxon for a string of bells, 'gleow'.

Ned and Mariel arrived at the stadium early, so he had time to relax amid the best artificial environment ever invented, and take in the aura. He knew people who felt that way about places like theaters and church, but to him, those settings were compromised by time and certainty. A play was never going to remove its most prominent actor halfway through act 1 due to ineffectiveness; a preacher would never crush the hopes of his flock and send them home disappointed a couple of Sundays a month. That’s why Ned loved baseball. It might break your heart, but you believed in it anyway. In a life of certainty, he cherished this elective relationship with peril.

As the spring months gave way to summer and then the first leaves of autumn started to fall from the trees by the lakeside, Séamus resolved to sell his da’s house and their small plot of land and travel to England with the money to work in the cotton mills. At least there he would have no reminders of the love he had known and lost. At least there he might stand a chance of putting Maggie Murphy and the horrors of Titanic from his mind. Fate had decided his path in life, and he now had to walk that path, wherever it might lead him.

If Glenn related to anything outside of music, it was animals. When he bicycled through the countryside near his parents’ lakeside vacation cottage outside of Toronto, he sang to the cows. His pets included rabbits, turtles, a fully functioning skunk, goldfish named Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Haydn, and a parakeet named Mozart. There was also a series of beloved dogs: a big Newfoundland named Buddy, an English setter named Sir Nickolson of Garelocheed—or Nick for short—and, later, Banquo, a collie. One of Glenn’s childhood dreams was to someday create a preserve for old, injured, and stray animals on Manitoulin Island, north of Toronto, where he wanted to live out his old age by himself, surrounded by animals.

Birsha, this is in your best interest!” I conveyed. “Go away Meddler, I have no business with you,” was the reply. “Should we break it down?” Michael asked preparing for mayhem. “No, he will not listen, this is on his head.” Gabriel assured. We left the city gates kicking the dust off our sandals. “Perhaps we shall have better reception from Bera?” I said but I had very little hope. As bad as the streets of Gomorrah were, the lakeside city was far worse.

But then, according to legend, a curious thing happened to Thorgils, something he was powerless to defend against for all his thousands of retainers. The crafty King Maelsechlainn of Meath, sent out his daughter with fifteen warriors disguised as maidens, lured Thorgils and fifteen Viking captains to a lakeside tryst, and drowned the lot.

Aaarrgghheeee….” There was a pounding of feet and a yell that would make a ninja master proud. I spun around just as Shawn dashed past me in a mindless panic. Before I could understand the reason behind his mad dash for freedom, I felt the brush of feathers. A black swan was madly flapping his wings and chasing after my boyfriend, reaching his long neck to peck at his butt. Shawn ran for his life, darting across the lawn and running in a circle before making his way back toward me. “Shawn!” I gasped in shock and panic. He attempted to jump over a small tree in the garden, but caught his foot and went sprawling on the lakeside path, knocking me off balance as he fell. I took a step backward with the impact of his body against mine, but there was nothing behind me apart from lake. The water was knee deep, and I fell, spread eagle on my back, and splashed into it without hurting myself. But it was cold, wet, and dirty. Birds scattered in fright as I picked myself up with disgust. Ow, help, ow, help, ow, get off, ow.” Shawn was still yelling, and I looked up to see a swan attacking his prone body, pecking at his arms, legs, and face. His mother came to the rescue, using her handbag like a battle-ax, knocking the bird away from Shawn, then swinging the bag in front of the swan’s face until he gave up the fight and retreated to the water. I climbed out of the lake, dripping and stinking like a sewer. “Shawn?” There was blood on his clothes, and my heart stopped. “Shawn? Baby? You’re bleeding.” He sat up gingerly and inspected a couple of peck marks on his arms before touching his chin. “Oh, fiddlesticks,” he exclaimed. “I hit my chin when I fell. How bad is it, Harley?” Still soaking wet, I drove him to the hospital, where Christine exclaimed with delight over his injuries before the doctor slipped in three stitches under his chin. Christine patched up his peck marks and cleaned his grazed palms before we went home.

God loves his creation (just read Job 38 – 41), and we should feel humbled and privileged that he entrusted it to our care. Rather than treat this world like a hotel room that someone else will clean up, we should treat it like a lakeside cabin that our boss let us borrow for the weekend. How we treat it shows God how much he can trust us with his other things.

Saint Joseph, Michigan is a hamlet catered specifically to the tastes of rich, vacationing city folk. In the summer, these wealthy tourists haul their yachts out of storage and settle into their lakeside summer homes. When they aren’t oiling up on the beach, they flock to quaint ice cream parlors and overpriced clothing and art stores along Dove Street. Of course, none of the permanent residents of St. Joe can afford to buy anything from those boutiques, but we do get a little pleasure when yuppies get their stilettos stuck in the cracks of our brick-paved roads. Apart from the beach and movie theater, it’s our main source of entertainment.

marine,

Borgenicht o çocuğun önlüğünü ilk kez gördükten sonra eve geldiğinde sevincinden dans etmişti. Henüz hiçbir şey satmış değildi. Hâlâ tek kuruşu bile yoktu, umutsuzdu ve fikrinden bir şey çıkarmanın yıllar sürecek ve belini bükecek bir emek gerektirdiğini biliyordu. Ancak coşkuluydu, çünkü yıllarca sürecek bu zorlu emek, içerdiği umutlar nedeniyle, ona bir yük gibi gelmiyordu. Bill Gates de Lakeside’da ilk kez bir klavyenin başına oturduğunda aynı şeyleri hissetmişti. Haftada yedi gece, gecede sekiz saat müzik yapacakları söylendiğinde Beatles dehşetle irkilmemişti. Karşılarına çıkan fırsatın üzerine atlamışlardı. Çok çalışmak, ancak hiçbir anlam taşımadığında bir hapis cezasıdır. Anlamı olduğunda, eşinizi belinden yakalayıp durmaksızın döndürmenize neden olacak türde bir şeye dönüşür. ========== Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell)

Listen, I know we've been clowning around, but I want you to be okay with this. I don't want you to make a decision based on what I want. I want you to be here, but I need you to want that too.

This wasn't how their story was supposed to go. This wasn't what she dreamed of. And yet, everything had changed.

I’ll grieve forever for Ben, but there is a slippery slope to letting grief consume me.

There is only you, Anna. Only for me.

The things you do to me. My body. My heart … You could shatter me, but fuck do I want to be broken by you.

Anna. I’ve loved you from afar for over twenty-five years. And now, I’d like to love you up close.

What does moving forward look like for us? I can’t deny the guilt, but I also can’t erase the slow-burning feelings I’m developing for this man.

Ben was dead but parts of me were tingling back to life. And I just wanted to let go a little. The thought still feels selfish. I can’t bring Ben back, but I don’t know how to move forward. I don’t know how to be me.

I can’t lose you next.” “Sweetheart.” His quiet groan is a plea … “No one else is leaving, Anna. Especially not me.” He squeezes me tighter. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for you as long as you need me.” Did I need him? I swore I never would. Oh, how my feelings have changed. I very much want Mason in my life.

Mason, we can’t keep doing this.” “Doing what?” “Winding each other up, only to walk away.” “What if I don’t want to walk away?” What if I want to hold tight and never let go?

Anna is more than a friend. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to commitment. I’m dedicated to her, to us, to the potential of what we could be if she’d only let me in.

You’ve never been in love?” Her voice softens, tiptoeing into a topic we probably shouldn’t discuss. “Only been one perfect woman in my life and she wouldn’t ever be mine.

My hands haven’t left her hair, but one slides down her neck and finds its place above her left breast. Feeling that heartbeat under her skin. Knowing it beats for me, for her. We are both living, but I want that heart to love me. My eyes close on the dangerous thought. She’ll break me if she does. Heartbreaker and ball-buster all rolled into one. This woman could shatter me because I’ve never wanted anything more than to deserve her.

I was a despicable man and didn’t deserve a good woman in my life. But, oh what I wouldn’t give for a woman like Jenna.

When you’ve been alone for a long time, craving company becomes your thing. Companionship becomes your desire. When you can’t stand yourself, you want someone else to stand you.

I can’t walk away from her or her girls. She’s mine, and I’ll do everything to make certain she accepts me as hers.

There are so many questions in those dark eyes, and I lean down to quickly kiss his lips. “Archer,” I whisper, answering all of his concerns. Yes, I’m okay with this. Yes, I want him. Yes, I could love him if he’d let me.

Our hearts race, and my hand pauses on his chest, covering that sacred spot. “It beats for you,” Archer whispers, and my breath catches. “Same with mine,” I whisper back.

What were you doing with me?” “I was hoping you’d love me.

I’m a selfish man, Jenna. I want to be here for me. For what I know you can give me.” … “And I’m going to try like hell to give it back to you.

I want to be your person. Let me be your second chance. Be my first time at love.

I had no idea that Lakeside didn’t have its own jail.” I didn’t know that either. Learn something new every single day.

aren’t

Kutluk and Magnu-Kelka were almost certainly not the first victims of the Black Death, but their remote little lakeside cottage is where the most terrible natural disaster in history begins to enter the human record.

The woman shocks me to my core, but I love it, and I’m at great risk of falling for her. Or flying.

I want her, even if it is only a ten-day fling, or eight, or wherever we’re at. After watching her interact with my friends and love on my boys all night, I know there hasn’t been anyone like her in my life.

I wonder briefly if anyone considers the other. The one who quickly falls in love with both children and father. What happens to her when her heart bursts with feelings for more than one Weller boy?

I want to be with you. There’s no doubt I want between your thighs and inside you, but let me be clear, it’s more than fucking you. I want to know who you are and why you’re so kind. I want to understand how my boys fell in love with you so fast and if I can get there too because I am falling. Definitely falling.

Please push me … Push me to be a better man. Push me to be what you see in me.

God, I love you so much. I never thought I’d feel so free…free to just love.

Although now I'm starting to see that the shiny veneer is just that. Underneath the layers of polish are regular people, with the same problems as everyone else; they just have prettier masks to hide behind.

He left home early, as he always did, six days a week, fifty weeks a year. A cautious breakfast, appropriate to a short round man aiming to stay in shape through his forties. A long walk down the carpeted corridors of a lakeside house appropriate to a man who earned a thousand dollars on each of those three hundred days he worked. A thumb on the button of the garage-door

Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother’s many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.

A little quick math. In 1968 there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the world, according to the UN. About 18 million of them lived in the United States. About 270,000 of them lived in Washington state. A little over 100,000 of them lived in the Seattle area. And only about 300 of them attended Lakeside School. Start with 303 million, end with 300.

Most of what I learned at Lakeside-Milam happened between lectures and movies and writing assignments,

Along a plateau the traveller passes the reservoir, the Wachusett Reservoir, its bank more or less covered with pines, to West Boylston, a village by the lakeside. “Mount” Wachusett looks over the wilderness from Clinton northward.

Shadow On The Lake by Stewart Stafford Neighbour coughing up phlegm, As Stefan began his morning jog, With an elderly shadow escort, His stooping gait shocked him. Outcast sleeper in their lakeside car, Windows fogged with condensation, Homeless sightseer or lost tourist? Absconded prisoner, lovers entwined? He left the stranger(s) undisturbed, Pulling a sharp U-turn at the lake, His aged shape still fleet of foot, Dormant fugitive(s) eating his dust. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

I begin to retrace my old steps, past the same lakeside buildings and the same crumbling homes, the steps I’d taken when I was a completely different person, full of hate and confusion, loss and ignorance. It’s an odd feeling to wander these same streets as the person I am now. At once familiar and strange.

The Girl At The Lake by Stewart Stafford She stood at her post rigidly again, By the lakeside in a white dress, Staring sadly down into the water, Wind left hair and clothes unruffled. I waved and called out to her then, She looked up at me and through me, No recognition from her mourner's mask, She went back to staring at lapping water. Jumped in my car to check on her welfare, Driving over to her sole sentinel's mark, Nobody around, just ripples kissing the shore, Arriving home, I saw her at the water's edge. She plunged into the lake in plain sight of me, I dived in with my shoes on to save her, Not suicide, she tricked my life from me, "You can't leave now, darling," as I drowned. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Underneath the layers of polish are regular people, with the same problems as everyone else; they just have prettier masks to hide behind.

And I will love you twice as much on the days when you find it hard to love yourself.

Lover? Did you just call me a nickname?” Her hand leaves my face, but a smile takes over the worried look of a minute before. “Well…” “I guess we are.” “Guess?” Char acts indignant, but I know it’s for show. I can feel her body softening as she continues, “I hope that’s what we are! I don’t want to be just some quick fuck.” “Charlene!” “Or a one-night stand.” “Hardly.” “Or the piece on the side!

Who are you always looking for?" people sometimes asked him. "The love of my life," he always replied.

But broken people break things, and I leave behind a path of destruction in my wake.