Mccormick Quotes

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

The Mother of God. Good-looking. Well-dressed. A good person. Knows how to make the absolute best of a situation. And never uppity about any of it.

Mary’s supposed to be the opposite of Eve, but I bet she had childbirth pain just like everyone else.

Blessed art thou among women.” Who can’t relate to a line like that? It’s just saying you’re one holy chick and everyone, even God, is totally into you.

Simply to endure is to triumph.

You have to admit that anatomically, this ear business rivals my father’s fear that a bicycle seat could ruin your virginity

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.

they’re teaching us that the real Catholic belief about Mary is that she got pregnant through her ear—that “Just as Eve listened to Satan and gave birth to sin, so Mary listened to Gabriel and became pregnant with the Son of God.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

Because Mary, a female, is so important to Catholicism, you feel that no one should be disappointed by having a girl instead of a boy, or if they are, they might just discover one day what a big mistake they made. Mary showed the world that girls shouldn’t be underestimated.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

Diocesan exams are given at the end of March to students in Catholic schools throughout Massachusetts from the fourth to the twelfth grade. You have to answer four out of seven essay questions. A typical question goes something like this: Theologians speculate about whether Christ actually appeared to His disciples after He rose from the dead. Is the scripture clear on this? Discuss, with reference to the different gospels and their variations, and to different theological interpretations

It’s in English,” I call out as it comes into focus. “It says ‘Made in China.’” At first Sister Loretta thinks I must be wrong, but when she sees the words for herself, she explains to us that God anticipated that the Communists in China would create technology that makes medals, rosaries, and plastic figurines really cheaply, and He was ready to temporarily forgive them for not being a democracy and for being pagans if they were willing to sell these holy goods to us at a fantastic discount, which shows us that God, like everyone else, goes out of His way to get a good deal on something He really needs. Who doesn’t like a bargain?

Sometimes when we’re in situations where we feel we’re not in control, we do things, especially things that take a lot of energy, as a way of making ourselves feel we have some power.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

You show you care, you die. You show you fear, you die. You show nothing, maybe you live.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Guard the portals of your mind.

Then I place the blade next to the skine on my palm. A tingle arced across my scalp. The flood tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next. What happened next was thet a perfect, straight line of blood bloomed from under the blade.The line grow into a long, Fat bubbel, A lush crimson bubbel that got bigger and bigger. I watch from above, waiting to see how big it would get before it burst. when it did, I felt awesome. Satisfied, finally. Then exhausted.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

People who aren't asleep when Ruby comes around have to take sleeping pills. Everyone is afraid of those pills- even the substance- abuse guests.

My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Reluctantly she lifted her eyes to his, and he went on: "I want you to understand this as though I were one of your own people." He drew in a deep breath. "Thank you. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for my life.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

I began to realize that life, despite moments of happiness and joy, is really about discovering priorities and dealing with unforeseen vagaries, differences, obstacles, inconveniences, and imperfections.

Because I want us to be friends again. I made some really bad choices, and I'm sorry. You're leaving for Florida and if we don't fix this now, it won't be fixed.

Then I placed the blade next to the skin on my palm. A tingle arched across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spilled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next...

A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.

Oddly enough, I feel the most alone when I'm in a room full of people.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

Most of all, I am afraid of life outside this place

I see the fragmented beauty of grace in their lives despite continued struggles. Beautiful mosaics formed by broken pieces.

A KIND OF ILLNESS This ache in my chest is a relentless thing, worse than any fever. A fever is gone with a few of Mumtaz's white pills. But this illness has had me in its grip for a week now. This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

Back at the hut, all my sister, they start to cry. "No crying," my aunt says, very strict. "You cry only in your mind." But later, when everyone else asleep, I hear my aunt, her tears, they fall like rain.

That first phrase-please bless me, Father, for I have sinned-was so humbling and so total, Matt always felt a kind of absolution as soon as he said it

I know I have this judgmental side that I'm often fighting against. But today I recognized the depths of my assumptions about people. What I envision is nothing remotely similar to the reality. Humility hurts. Coming home is disturbing.

Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean its not real

Rochelle," she calls out, still looking at me. "Is there anyone down at the desk? I need something." I'm too startled to move. Is she going to tell on me, get me in trouble? Rochelle's gotten up; she's banging the toilet stall doors open one by one, checking to make sure no one's in there. When the last stall turns up empty, she gives Amanda an annoyed look. "What do you need this time of night?" Amanda smiles at me, then turns to face Rochelle. "A tampon

Hey, S.T.," Sydney says finally. I don't budge. She nudges me with her elbow. "You want to know something?" I still can't look up. But I nod. "It's not your fault either." She says this like it's not big deal. Like it's nothing. But it's everything.

From what I've been able to figure out, all of us are here together and we need one another. We must celebrate each other's differences. Learning to ask for help is as important as learning the value of helping other people. I believe all the people in my life have been there for a reason, and I hope I have been in theirs for a reason as well. It's taken me a while, but I feel truly blessed. After all is said and done, I love life, I love people, and I love being me.

i inhale deeply, drinking the warmth in the scent of mountain sunshine, a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times, and a hundred times more. I have been starved, and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

Turning, she looked out at the icy landscape, the soaring trees, branches dark and bitten blue with frost. And for a moment, she had something like a premonition, a feeling that something terrible was watching her, something hungry and sick. She could nearly hear it out there, panting between the trees, its breath ragged and spoiled.

She was beautiful in the way people call the desert beautiful, which is to say that although some people actually believed it, most of the time it was said in response to someone else's denigration of it.

I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.

Auntie says that in the city, people gather and pay money to see beautiful women and handsome men put on a show. The people in the show are called movie stars.

Lincoln's so efficient, especially for a guy who "bends rules".

His grip on my shoulders changes into a massage that causes me to close my eyes. He could touch me like that for the rest of my life and I'd never move.

Those that wander find the rarest gems~Victoria McCormick

Lila McCormick—you’re partnered with Rico Vega.” Lila groaned, “No,” while Rico pumped his fist twice to his heart and then raised a finger to the sky. “ Gracias a dios.

The significant difference between Proust and Faulkner, for Sartre, is that where Proust discovers salvation in time, in the recovery of time past, for Faulkner time is never lost, however much he may want, like a mystic, to forget time. Both writers emphasize the transitoriness of emotion, of the condition of love or misery, or whatever passes because it is transitory in time. "Proust really should have employed a technique like Faulkner's," Sartre legislates, "that was the logical outcome of his metaphysic. Faulkner, however, is a lost man, and because he knows that he is lost he risks pushing his thoughts to its conclusion. Proust is a classicist and a Frenchman; and the French lose themselves with caution and always end by finding themselves.

Love is like the senses of the body. Imagine you are blind, you can see an object using touch. You can feel around it and see it mentally. Now imagine you can't feel, but can see. You can't feel what you see. You may see love, but not feel love. When you feel love, you also so see it.

When we encounter a friend who's depressed or afraid, we automatically try to take that distress away and to cheer the person up. While we may be operating with the best of intentions, this Band-Aid approach only reinforces the condition. Unless people experience their pain completely and begin to undrstand it, they will not only fail to overcome it, they'll also lose the opportunity of using it to advance their own growth. Pain can get you somewhere, and that somewhere can be a life-enhancing experience. We all tend to forget that pain can signal change. Alleviating the symptoms of pain in someone, without helping them to get at its underlying source, robs them of an important to for self-exploration. It's also a way of placating that reinforces the person'S need to cave in and succumb to another. This attitude undermines healthy character development and contributes to psychospiritual, moral, and ultimately social decay.

What’s wrong with Bill McCormick? Can’t he run a washer? I thought he was one of our aerospace brains.” “He’s taking care of Marge,” Kit said, folding the T-shirt. “These things came out nice and white, didn’t they?” She put the folded T-shirt into the laundry basket, smiling. Like an actress in a commercial. That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

My objective in life, both professionally and personally, is to exercise all the skill sets acquired throughout the course of my life to serve the needs of others, and make a positive difference in the world around me.

They have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals who have become persuaded—by a Frederick Vanderbilt Field, or an Anita McCormick Blaine, or a Corliss Lamont, to mention a few names recently prominent, or by a Friedrich Engels, to go farther back.

I wasn't going to play by her rules. I was going to change them myself." -Avalin Marsh "Sometimes you have to look through someone else's eyes to see the best things about yourself." -Albert Huntington "It's worth a shot, it's always worth a shot. Even if it's your very last bullet." -Lyle McCormick "I was always the invisible one, Avalin. It was you who made sure I was seen." -Prajna Sarasvati "Let's hope we can subdue her before it comes to methods that involve injecting people with pointy things, yes?" -Madeline Gray

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives. 2. Myth: Prayer works. Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject. 3. Myth: Atheists are immoral. There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies. 4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science. In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion. 5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death. We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. 6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view. 7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil. The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention. 8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe. All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? 9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God. Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.

There were those in power determined to stop such splits by suppressing all talk of abolition, and McCormick was one. And the Old School’s position on slavery was that it had “no authority”24 to pronounce on the matter; it stayed firmly on the fence. Therefore, McCormick pushed the Old School doctrines wherever he could.

The suggestion had come from Cyrus H. McCormick, one of America’s richest men, who’d donated $800 (about $25,000 today)—nearly half the total cost. McCormick was not only an extraordinarily wealthy individual but powerful in all the ways a man can be. At six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, he was a “massive Thor of industry

At some point, the girl who never thinks she is pretty, will believe she is. And she is beautiful.

Lincoln’s eyes travel over my body, his gaze lingering on my curves. “I think I’m falling in love.”

When you live alone in a house, you can hear things, feel things that you don't when you live with other people.

In its simplest form, meditation is an ongoing process in our mind where we try to remain focused in a world where we are constantly barraged with distraction.

There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.” - Shunryu Suzuki

A man should never make a fortune while another man starves.

No, no, you twit, move towards the well-hung male of the species! It's only natural; you don't want to insult Mother Nature. Go claim your mate.

The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillation, and the effect of decisiveness itself ‘makes things go’ and creates confidence.

You do not need outside approval. You came into this life pre-approved!

Anytime we try to remember anyone we've loved, what we're really remembering is ourselves.

He’d learned through the years that greed and jealousy were much greater motivators than doing what was right for society.

I ask Ama why. "Why," I say, "must women suffer so?" "This has always been our fate," she says. "Simply to endure," she says, "is to triumph.

To be faithful, he wrote, a person had to be concerned less about himself and more about caring for his neighbor.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.

At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.

I miss the past,” Avo said before realizing that missing the past was what missing was.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” he would later write. “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”2

A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it's time to make a stew.

He really loved

wasn’t so sure. After all, the ghost seemed quite confident in addressing him and Tyler as Billy Ray and Zachariah. Hoping to learn more, he read through the rest of the 1916 ledger, disappointed to find no other mention of either Allie McCormick’s disappearance or the Hobson brothers’ fate. “Well, I believe we now have enough information to work with,” said John,

For most of my life, I have been followed and sometimes haunted by Marcia Brady. I don’t have a choice in the matter. Imagine always being overshadowed by a younger, prettier, more popular you.

The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!

But men and women are different in the way that they feel loved. Men like to be admired for what they do, for their integrity and their accomplishments, whether it’s at work or at the gym or mowing the lawn, because it makes them feel manly. When a woman tells a man that she is proud of him, or she tells him that he did a good job, he’ll about bend over backwards to take care of her and love her.” “But women like attention from men, because it makes them feel feminine and adored. That’s why they’re always fixin’ themselves up, doing their hair, wearing pretty clothes and makeup and jewelry and perfume. It’s all to attract your attention, you know.” (Thelma Jenkins)

Mrs. Bates continued with her list of assigned partners while Lila knelt next to her, begging for a change of heart. Rico chuckled. “I’m off to peel my partner off the floor.” He yelled to Lila as he walked toward her, “Casate conmigo, diosa.

We all fictionalize ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. For some it is a soap opera, for others an epic, but, for all of us, it's an ongoing narrative that we constantly manipulate and reshape, improving (like the best anecdotes) in the retelling. This is not just true of writers. The story is one of the key ways we define and order our experiences as human beings: how we tell ourselves and others who we are. (from the Daily Telegraph)

So when the displays were erected it came as something of a surprise to discover that the American section was an outpost of wizardry and wonder. Nearly all the American machines did things that the world earnestly wished machines to do—stamp out nails, cut stone, mold candles—but with a neatness, dispatch, and tireless reliability that left other nations blinking. Elias Howe’s sewing machine dazzled the ladies and held out the impossible promise that one of the great drudge pastimes of domestic life could actually be made exciting and fun. Cyrus McCormick displayed a reaper that could do the work of forty men—a claim so improbably bold that almost no one believed it until the reaper was taken out to a farm in the Home Counties and shown to do all that it promised it could. Most exciting of all was Samuel Colt’s repeat-action revolver, which was not only marvelously lethal but made from interchangeable parts, a method of manufacture so distinctive that it became known as “the American system.

All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don’t die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don’t have to fight. I don’t have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.

we have all, at some time or another, been guilty of mercilessness. Our own evil is a fact we often choose to ignore. Evil is not just "out there" but is the shadow Carl Jung described as lurking within every human. Whether we like it or not, it is our legacy, part and parcel of the human package. To step outside of our comfort zones and admit this takes courage, but without this sobering recognition we're more likely to lose our capacity for compassion, humility and forgiveness. If we lose our awareness of this side of our own nature, we risk becoming slaves to our own dark side. What goes unacknowledged in us has a tendency to grow larger. Tenderness and compassion are qualities we must cultivate and never take for granted. This alone would make the world a better place by far. We

Each year, nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families, intentionally o r unwittingly, into a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India. W orldwide , the U.S. State D epartmen t estimates that nearly half a millio n children are trafficked into the sex trade annually.

No matter how close you are to the basket, you should always drop your bag, or hand full of discs, and give full attention. Many 2-3 foot putts are missed because a player is in a hurry and fails to drop his bag. Many shots are missed in life because we fail to drop our baggage and give full concentration to our true goals.

our, against limitations imposed subtly, in a thousand ways, from birth. To be female, to be working class, to be unexceptional. At my school, the boys took woodwork and metalwork, the girls domestic science and needlework. It never occurred to me to question. I gave it no thought. But now I think of sparks and sawdust and wish it had been different.

Suppose that members of a religious movement, such as Christianity, maintain that the existence of some powerful god and its goals or laws can be known through their scriptures, their prophets, or some special revelation. Suppose further that the evidence that is available to support the reliability of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations is weaker than that God is hypothetically capable of producing. That is, suppose that Christians maintain that Jesus was resurrected on the basis of the Gospels, or that God’s existence can be known through the Bible, or Muslims insist on the historical authenticity of the Koran. Could God, the almighty creator of the universe, have brought it about so that the evidence in favor of the resurrection, the Bible, or the Koran was better than we currently find it? I take it that the answer is obviously yes. Even if you think there is evidence that is sufficient to prove the resurrection, a reasonable person must also acknowledge that it could have been better. And there’s the problem. If the capacity of that god is greater than the effectiveness or quality of those scriptures, prophets, or special revelations, then the story they are telling contradicts itself. 'We know our god is real on the basis of evidence that is inadequate for our god.' Or, 'The grounds that lead us to believe in our god are inconsistent with the god we accept; nevertheless, we believe in this god that would have given us greater evidence if it had wished for us to believe in it.' Given the disparity between the gods that these religious movements portend and the grounds offered to justify them, the atheist is warranted in dismissing such claims. If the sort of divine being that they promote were real and if he had sought our believe on the basis of the evidence, the evidential situation would not resemble the one we are in. The story doesn’t make internal sense. A far better explanation is that their enthusiasm for believing in a god has led them to overstate what the evidence shows. And that same enthusiasm has made it difficult for them to see that an all powerful God would have the power to make his existence utterly obvious and undeniable. Since it’s not, the non-believer can’t possibly be faulted for failing to believe.

I love you.” My words made his eyes widen in shock, but I didn’t have time to wait for it to wear off. “I’ve loved you since the moment we met. I’m sorry I killed you, Kade… but I’m not sorry it brought you here.” The fingers that brushed against his lips trembled. “Maybe in our next life, things will be different? It can be you and me. Maybe we’ll finally fit. Soulmates, right?

began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.

Being nonreactive to destructive or hostile behaviour does not imply passive acceptance of it. Rather, it means we need to deal with it, take off our blinders and see the unacceptable. To redirect the destructive enery, we must dance with the shadow, not kill it. When we can achieve this stance, we learn to confront maladaptive or nonproductive behaviour matter-of-factly, without becoming embroiled in the heat of our own emotions. This nonreflexive style of being in the world is potent.

There’s this girl…this woman I can’t get out of my mind.” He spilled the story of his seduction of sweet, innocent Amanda McCormick for Rufus’s examination. When he finished talking, there was another silence. “You did that?” Rufus’s voice was as deep and gravelly as a quarry. “Fucked some poor virgin while posing as her fiancé?” “Yeah.” “You got some balls. How’d you know you’d be a close enough match to this Baxter?” “Brown hair, blue eyes, that’s all she seemed to know about him.” Spence couldn’t explain his need for the rush of tempting fate. “I took a chance. It was a gamble.” “Jesus, you’re a mean son of a bitch.” “I didn’t want to hurt her. I was just having fun.” He sounded like a spoiled child even to himself. “And now you want to go see this woman and try to make it right?” Rufus said. “Just how the hell did you think you were going to fix it? By showing up and wrecking her marriage, if you haven’t done that already?” It was Spence’s turn to pause. “Haven’t you done enough to this lady? Where’s your head, boy? Leave her alone.” “I can’t. I have to see her again.” He didn’t want to share his dreams of the little girl. He’d sound crazy. Rufus laughed harshly. “So you can try and get another piece of tail?” “No. It’s not like that.” “What? You think you’re in love. Son, you don’t know the first thing about it. If you did, you’d be putting this woman’s needs above your own.” He thought of the little girl telling him to go to Amanda. “Maybe what she needs is me.” Rufus made a scoffing noise. “A woman needs a man who’ll stand by her, be there through hard times and good. From what you’ve told me these past months, this is the longest you’ve stayed put in one place in your life and that’s only ‘cause they won’t let you out.” “I just want to do the right thing.” “Then do like I say. Leave her be. You think she’s going to be happy to see you again?” Spence pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders and watched a gray cloud puff from his mouth. “You still there, boy?” “Where else?” “Don’t take it too hard. Everybody does things they’re sorry for. Sometimes there’s just no way to make it right.” He leaned back against the wall and reviewed the stupid chain of events that had landed him in jail. Maybe Rufus was right and there was no way he could ever apologize for what he’d done to Amanda. He should let the whole thing slide and leave the woman in peace.

Why is it that when you’ve lost someone your thoughts go back to the beginning? The first shy meeting of eyes. The first tentative kiss. The happy times together. He’d heard people say that the mind plays tricks, remembering good over bad or sad. Maybe it was nature’s way of keeping a sane person from going crazy with guilt. Not him. From sunup to sundown he remembered his mistakes. All of them. In vivid Technicolor. On a good day, it felt like a fist shoved down his throat and into his stomach to turn him inside-out like a sock. Nothing looks normal, nothing’s the same, until it can be turned right-side-out again.” ~ Dylan Clark