Meals Mother Quotes

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

Do you think the ability to sleep in counts as a special skill?” I asked Dad, trying to sound torn over the decision. “Yes, list that. And don’t forget to write that you can eat an entire meal in under five minutes,” he replied. I laughed. It was true; I did tend to inhale my food. “Oh, the both of you! Why don’t you just write down that you’re an absolute heathen!” My mother went storming from the room.

Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.

realized that such small gestures – the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn’t take sugar, the way Laura had placed two little biscuits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon – such things could mean so much.

It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGuyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly ... Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of, the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends, and a more-than minor life. And then i screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugar-coating it: She deserved better friends. When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified. into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it spite of having lost her. Beacause I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know that she forgives me for being dumb and sacred and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know: I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirety. There is a part of her knowable parts. And that parts has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, One thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself -those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Eidson's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

Sickness burrowed deep inside you, and even if you were cured, even if you could be cured, you would never forget how it felt to be betrayed by your own body. So when he knocked on doors, carrying donated meals, he did not tell the sick to get well. He just came to sit with them while they weren't.

My mom was never the type to write me long letters or birthday cards. We never got mani-pedis together, she never gave me a locket with our picture in it. She wouldn't tell me I looked beautiful, or soothe me when a boy broke my heart. But she was there. She kept me safe. She did her best to make me tough. She fed me the most delicious home-cooked meals. For lunch, she'd pack me rare sliced steak over white rice and steamed broccoli. She sent me to private school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She is still there for me. She will always be there for me, as long as she's able. That's a great mom.

My mother used to say that a good meal could ease a troubled heart.

At least, you two have decent manners," says Effie as we're finishing the main course. "The pair last year ate everything with their hands like a couple of savages. It completely upset my digestion." ... My mother taught Prim and me to eat properly, so yes, I can handle a fork and knife. But I hate Effie Trinket's comment so much I make a point of eating the rest of my meal with my fingers. Then I wipe my hands on the tablecloth. This makes her purse her lips tightly together.

In many ways, food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she seemed—constantly pushing me to be what she felt was the best version of myself—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.

But I didn't want to be anyone's green card ticket, meal ticket, cook, washing lady, housemaid, personal masseuse, baby machine, regularly-scheduled-hole in the mattress. Only to end up dead, discarded, buried in a ditch somewhere, dumped into the big, blue sea, all used up. Boys should just stay home and fuck their mothers.

Mothering seemed like downhill skiing, or cooking elaborate meals from scratch — sure, anyone could learn how to do it, but it was much easier for the people who had seen other people do it first, and well, from a very young age.

That an old Charonte custom that go back forever 'casue we a really old race of demons who go back even before forever." She looked over to where Danger's shade glittered in the opposite corner while the former Dark-Huntress was assisting Pam and Kim with the birth, and explained the custom to her. "When a new baby is born you kill off an old annoying family member who gets on everyone's nerves which for all of us would be the heifer-goddess 'cause the only person who like her be you Akra-Kat. I know she you mother and all, but sometimes you just gotta say no thank you. You a mean old heifer-goddess who need to go play in traffic and get run over by something big like a steamroller or bus or something else really painful that would hurt her a lot and make the rest of us laugh" "Not to mention the Simi barbecue would have been fun too if someone, Akra-Kat, hadn't stopped the Simi from it. I personally think it would have been a most magnificent gift for the baby. Barbecued heifer-goddess Artemis. Yum! No better meal. Oh then again baby got a delicate constitution and that might give the poor thing indigestion. Artemis definitely give the Simi indigestion and I ain't even ate her yet.

I fantasized about having a mother who was also raised on Sesame Street, Happy Meals, and John Hughes movies. Maybe she could ask me white mom questions like “How are you feeling?” or say white mom things like “I love you to the moon and back.” We would share the same first language. She could help me pick out a dress that I actually liked, instead of the dress that was most discounted. We would understand each other and not fight as much.

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

It feels as though there is a gaping hole in the middle of everything. The decades of my mother's life here with Thalia, they are dark, vast spaces to me. I have been absent. Absent for all the meals Thalia and Mama have shared at this table, the laughs, the quarrels, the stretches of boredom, the illnesses, the long string of simple rituals that make up a lifetime. Entering my child-hood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I'd started, then abandoned, long ago.

Then what in your opinion is a good story?' 'What it's always been, monkey,' Ganesha said. 'One dhansu conflict. Some chaka-chak song and dance. Grief. Love. Love for the lover, love for the mother. Love for the land. Comedy. Terror. One tremendous villain whom we must love also. All the elements properly balanced and mixed together, item after item, like a perfect meal with a dance of tastes. There you have it.

MOM - noun - One who sacrifices her body, sleep, social life, spending money, eating hot meals, peeing alone, patience, memory, energy and sanity for LOVE!

It was called ‘We Wear the Mask’, by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it. We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle’s bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions. I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more. I stopped writing.

Well,” I say, “I once saw a show about a guy who bludgeoned his mother to death in the kitchen and then cooked a full meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes, so anything is possible.” “Iris,” Alice says wearily. “You seem like such a nice person and her your brain is full of horrible things.

I am so thankful to MOTHER for making my ordinary life extraordinary. MOTHER - Multiplied Opportunities Through Her Endless Reinvention.

Men,' Gabby sighs. 'Spend all their time trying to turn you into their mothers, wanting clothes ironed, meals cooked, but then they despise you because you remind them of their mothers.

A real mother could not have done more. Maybe the time has come to change my mind, I thought. When we finished the meal I took the plunge. I looked directly at her and said, “Mom, let’s go home.

Mother, I spoke to the duke. He understands that this is not a formal meal. And he specifically told me that he was looking forward to a change of pace. He has no family himself, so he has never experienced anything like a Bridgerton family dinner.” “God help us.” Violet’s face went utterly pale.

This is incredibly unlike our modern world. We expect a single working mother to be the one to throw the baseball with her eight-year-old, rock the newborn, read to the three-year-old, and, by the way, cook a nutritious meal, help with homework, do the laundry, get everyone to bed, then wake up and get them all ready for childcare and school so she can go work all day, only to rush home to do it all again. All alone.

I thought that teaching twenty-eight energetic and needy children how to read had to be the hardest job on earth. I was wrong - mothering was. Now I had to give up my right to sleep when I needed it, to a meal without interruptions, to relaxation when I wanted it, and most importantly, my right to withdraw when I felt overwhelmed.

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say? What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight out into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of the father facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide, what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam? If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into the clouds what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the moon, the basket with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood all picnics are eaten on the grave?

His master plan to get them all out the door early met its first check of the day when he opened his closet door to discover that Zap the Cat, having penetrated the security of Vorkosigan House through Miles's quisling cook, had made a nest on the floor among his boots and fallen clothing to have kittens. Six of them. Zap ignored his threats about the dire consequences of attacking an Imperial Auditor, and purred and growled from the dimness in her usual schizophrenic fashion. Miles gathered his nerve and rescued his best boots and House uniform, at a cost of some high Vor blood, and sent them downstairs for a hasty cleaning by the overworked Armsman Pym. The Countess, delighted as ever to find her biological empire increasing, came in thoughtfully bearing a cat-gourmet tray prepared by Ma Kosti that Miles would have had no hesitation in eating for his own breakfast. In the general chaos of the morning, however, he had to go down to the kitchen and scrounge his meal. The Countess sat on the floor and cooed into his closet for a good half-hour, and not only escaped laceration, but managed to pick up, sex, and name the whole batch of little squirming furballs before tearing herself away to hurry and dress.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to give this book to my mother. To present it to her as a precious gift over a meal that I've cooked for her. To say: Here is everything that keeps us from really talking. Here is my heart. Here are my words. I wrote this for you.

I realized that such small gestures - the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn't take sugar, the way Laura had placed two little bisquits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon - such things could mean so much.

If it makes you feel any better Tory, they were just as bad when Mia was born. At least you don’t have Sin, Kish, and Damien running around, trying to boil water for no other reason than that’s what someone had told Sin husbands are supposed to do and since Sin doesn’t know how to boil water, he had to micromanage the other two incompetents who’d never done it either. I’m amazed they didn’t band together to kill him during it or burn down the casino. And don’t get me started on my mother trying to murder my husband in the middle of it or her fighting with grandma over whose labors were more painful. Or, (she cast a meaningful glance to Simi,) someone setting my mother’s hair on fire and trying to barbecue her to celebrate the birth.” – Kat “That an old Charonte custom that go back forever ’cause we a really old race of demons who go back even before forever. When a new baby is born you kill off an old annoying family member who gets on everyone’s nerves which for all of us would be the heifer-goddess ’cause the only person who like her be you, Akra-Kat. I know she you mother and all, but sometimes you just gotta say no thank you. You a mean old heifer-goddess who need to go play in tragic and get run over by something big like a steamroller or bus or something else really painful that would hurt her a lot and make the rest of us laugh. Not to mention the Simi barbecue would have been fun too if someone, Akra-Kat, hadn’t stopped the Simi from it. I personally think it would have been a most magnificent gift for the baby. Barbecued heifer-goddess Artemis. Yum! No better meal. Oh then again baby got a delicate constitution and that might give the poor thing indigestion. Artemis definitely give the Simi indigestion and I ain’t even ate her yet.” – Simi

He fell in love with a skinny stray cat that would skulk around the dining hall during meals. Every day, Jake would offer it sausage or egg from breakfast and pepperoni or hamburger from lunch. Every day, it ran away from him. But Jake didn’t give up. Even when he had the stomach flu, he snuck out of the infirmary to try to feed it. He was not going to let it down. He would watch it from classroom windows. He even made up a poem about it that he sent home to his mother in a letter. Three months later, the little cat was finally hungry enough to trust him. It never occurred to Jake that the cat...

Then one detail caught my attention. "Time (of birth), 5:57 A.M." Wow! I really was born! I wasn't an alien who was dropped down into my adoptive parents' arms. I was a real baby who experienced a real birth from a real mother at a real time of day. For me, that tid-bit of information was like a meal to a starving woman.

... I will say this. Marriage is work. It's hard work. Harder than anything else you'll ever do. Believe me, I know. And do you want to know why?' James nodded and Ben Latrobe leaned forward as if to impart a deep, mysterious secret. 'Because marriage isn't about the wedding or the wedding trip afterward. It isn't about cozy nights spent in each other's arms or the way she makes you feel when she smiles. Oh, those things all have a part in it, but a very minor one. No, James, marriage is about sticking it out when it isn't so nice. Marriage is being there to pick up the pieces when your perfect world falls apart. It's seeing the mess you've made of things and being willing to work through it until you have created something better than you had before. It's listening to her fears, her troubles, and concerns. It's eating meals that don't taste as good as those your mother fixed, enduring her temperamental outburts and tears, and not giving up when things get hard.' Latrobe paused for a moment and a frown lined his face where the smile had been only moments before. 'True love is standing by your mate when his health fails, along with his business.' ... 'It's knowing that the world goes on and you can depend on each other even when everything else around you lies in ruins at your feet...

...I remember that my mother had always said to be polite and finish my meal. At last he gave no more struggles. The deed was done. Now the boat contained four men, not one heartbeat among us. The fate they had destined for another claimed them as well. The irony of it all was more delicious than the blood consumed. -- Quote by Lane DeLuca

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas, a thing now of the past!), and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile but more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night, first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer and the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but - hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

George learned from the woman’s daughter that she was having her midday meal and a rest in her room upstairs. “But Mother will be down in a little while,” she said. “Would you like to wait?

The melamed asked one of his young students, “Yussele, do you say your prayers before each meal?” “No, melamed.” “What? You don’t pray before each meal?!” “I don’t have to. My mother’s a good cook.

Hazel squinted. “How far?” “Just over the river and through the woods.” Percy raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? To Grandmother’s house we go?” Frank cleared his throat. “Yeah, anyway.” Hazel clasped her hands in prayer. “Frank, please tell me she’ll let us spend the night. I know we’re on a deadline, but we’ve got to rest, right? And Arion saved us some time. Maybe we could get an actual cooked meal?” “And a hot shower?” Percy pleaded. “And a bed with, like, sheets and a pillow?” Frank tried to imagine Grandmother’s face if he showed up with two heavily armed friends and a harpy. Everything had changed since his mother’s funeral, since the morning the wolves had taken him south. He’d been so angry about leaving. Now, he couldn’t imagine going back. Still, he and his friends were exhausted. They’d been traveling for more than two days without decent food or sleep. Grandmother could give them supplies. And maybe she could answer some questions that were brewing in the back of Frank’s mind—a growing suspicion about his family gift. “It’s worth a try,” Frank decided. “To Grandmother’s house we go.” Frank was so distracted, he would have walked right into the ogres’ camp. Fortunately Percy pulled him back.

The Temperature is Rising The heartbeat quickens my breath is controlled,my senses are illuminated like a mother to her young. This feeling I have I've know it before, when the gates are opened I'll remember the beginning. Awaiting, dreaming imagining the endless possibilities of moments together as I give into my desires. My body reacts it has a mind of its own leaving little clues yet I continue on. Poised and professional I cross my origin the passion that awaits it stirs like a simmer. The sweet aroma a treat being made just for him I know he will like, the hunger in his eyes his mouth soft and strong it only took me a moment as he continued to look on. I didn't even recognize my sound as I was in a sphere all alone I hoped and imagined it would be but my mind was left in awe like sweet chocolate after a meal.

A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.

From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately.

I conjured my father’s laugh and my mother’s cooking, the stars in the sky over Sylvan Lake. I made peace with anyone who might every have been an enemy. I asked forgiveness for every vain or selfish thing I’d done in my life. Inside the house in the sky, all the people I loved sat down for a big holiday meal. I was safe and protected. It was where the voices that normally tore through my head expressing fear and wishing for death went silent, until there was one left speaking. It was a calmer, stronger voice, one that to me felt divine. It said, See? You are okay, Amanda. It’s only your body that’s suffering, and you are not your body. The rest of you is fine.

Even before World War II, some parents began to redefine love. But they could usually afford to do that only after their last child was “married off,” as with Tevye and Golde of Fiddler on the Roof.1 TEVYE: Golde. . . . Do you love me? GOLDE: Do I love you? For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, Cooked your meals, cleaned your house, Given you children, milked the cow. After twenty-five years, why talk about Love right now? . . . TEVYE: But my father and my mother Said we’d learn to love each other. . . . Do you love me? GOLDE: For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him Fought with him, starved with him Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?

Rosie digested the information, but not the cake. Her mother was strict about eating between meals. 'A fat girl will never find a good man, Rosie,' was her view, handed down to her by Great-aunt Jessie, a woman of many cliches.

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe ‘the afterlife’ is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, ‘Teenagers think they are invincible’ with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

And, dear Lord, if I could just add a prayer for my son, Noah," my mother went on, a bit louder than before. "I'm so concerned for his sad, lonely heart." I rolled my eyes, and my sister snickered. "Dear Lord, please let him find someone to settle down with. Someone kind and caring and beautiful. Someone smart. Someone who remembers when it's Sunday. Someone who will tell him to take a shower before coming to his mother's house for a meal. Someone who--" "Okay, I think that's enough, Ma. God gets your drift.

For a beverage, you asked for some “cherry-assed Kool Aid.” Okay, now you’re just adding “assed” in places where it doesn’t even make sense. Regardless, we will fulfill your request for Cherry Kool-Aid. However, Halle Berry will not be pouring it from her mouth into yours. For dessert, you asked for your mother’s homemade peach cobbler. It is highly unorthodox for someone other than the prison kitchen staff to prepare a final meal. Also, you killed her about eight years ago, remember? So you’ll have to settle for Hostess.

When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What’s left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew. Mother

That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked--every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn't a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers.

Jaime figured that among the Xalisco Boys’ greatest innovations was figuring out that a mother lode of heroin demand was now waiting to be mined in these neighborhoods if they’d only offer convenience. The Happy Meal of dope, he called it. Marketed like fast food—to young people. “‘We want what we want when we want it and thus we are entitled to get it,’” he said. “This drug is following the same marketing [strategy] of every other product out there. ‘I’ll give you good heroin at a great price. You don’t have to go to the bad neighborhoods. I’ll deliver it for you.

Eating was still a sore point with Smriti.She failed to understand,when interesting options like mango juice or chocolates were available,why was she forced by her stupid mother to eat boring regular meals? After much contemplation,Nikhil came up with a suggestion'Don't give her food till she herself asks for it'. His idea'starve-to know-the-worth-of -food'made sense to Abhilasha,though it took her a great deal of resolve before she could actually try it out. So on a sunday,the'lady with an iron will'took over from'the soft and kind hearted mother'.she did not give her anything to eat and waited for the golden moment,expecting a hungry Smriti to beg for food. But the much awaited moment never came.Smriti was not at all bothered about her meal and kept playing happily. The day turned into evening and still there was no trace of hunger in her. "Aren't you feeling hungry?' now a worried mother had no option but to eat the humble pie and ask the daughter. "No Maa. My friend Pinky had brought wafers and chocolates. Those were so yummy that I ate them all......" And that was the end of her'starve-to -know-the-worth-of-food-mission.

The psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson devoted a chapter in his Pulitzer Prize—winning book, Childhood and Society, to his reflections on the American identity. “This dynamic country,” he wrote, “subjects its inhabitants to more extreme contrasts and abrupt changes during a generation than is normally the case with other great nations.” Such trends have only accelerated since Erikson made that observation in 1950. The effects of rapid social and economic shifts on the parenting environment are too well known to need detailing here. The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult. The result being successive generations of children in alienation, drug use and violence — what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.” Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.” These patterns characterize not only the earlyyears of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need — stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories — is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.

What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self, an expansion of self. Happiness comes as we move toward our goals, when things go our way. You get a big promotion. You graduate from college. Your team wins the Super Bowl. You have a delicious meal. Happiness often has to do with some success, some new ability, or some heightened sensual pleasure. Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in unison. Joy often involves self-forgetting. Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.

Humans can’t fly. The Earth isn’t flat. Her mother couldn’t lie. Three facts Aisha Malik would have been willing to bet her life on. Good thing she hadn’t, because her mother, in an attempt to secure a marriage proposal for her, had just told a lie. Aisha was an adequate cook as far as preparing normal, everyday meals was concerned, but making mind-blowing desserts, like the delicious chocolate cake everyone was generously praising? That was far beyond her culinary expertise. Contrary to what her mother had just said to impress their guests, that chocolate cake was not baked by Aisha. It was made in a bakery.

She was not crying out of stress or frustration or fear, although she had so much of those still in her bones. She was crying because she missed her mother. She missed her perfume, her meatloaf, missed the way she made impossible things happen. Nina missed lying in her mother’s arms on the sofa, watching television late at night, missed the way her mother would always tell her everything would be OK, the way her mother could make everything OK. She mourned the things that would never happen. The weddings her mother would never attend, the meals her mother would never make, the sunsets her mother would never see.

The ingredients are exactly the same, but the taste is not. And that’s because it’s not about the ingredients. Rather, it’s about the mother who took the time she didn’t have to create the meal she didn’t need for a child who didn’t understand. And once I became an adult, I realized that those ingredients make the best meals.

Can you keep a secret, Sarah?" she asked. I nodded, remembering all our secrets shared together in her mother's house, and she said, her breath hot in my ear, "You cannot harvest the corn until you go into the corn." I awoke with tears on my face, my hands clutching at the ribs around my heart. I had for more than forty years kept the past behind an impenetrable wall of my own devising. I thought that to move beyond this wall and revisit the past would scorch my reason and make me mad. But then, as I lay sweating in bed, restless and prickly, it came to me that to harvest a field of corn one does not wade into the dark middle of things and cut the stalks from the inside out. It is best done starting with the outside ears and working inward, stalk by stalk, keeping the light of the sun always at one's back so that its rays can illuminate each ear of corn, be it whole and sweet or black and blighted. And in this way does one make a meal that feeds a starving body back to wholeness. (183)

I see now how this must have come across to my mother, who was then in the ninth year of a job she’d taken primarily so she could help finance my college education, after years of not having a job so that she’d be free to sew my school clothes, cook my meals, and do laundry for my dad, who for the sake of our family spent eight hours a day watching gauges on a boiler at the filtration plant. My mom, who’d just driven an hour to fetch me from the airport, who was letting me live rent-free in the upstairs of her house, and who would have to get herself up at dawn the next morning in order to help my disabled dad get ready for work, was hardly ready to indulge my angst about fulfillment.

Losing the exchange booths and going to Hawaii had made my mother stronger. The Korean character has always been deeply colored by Confucian ideals, and that tradition was passed on to the Zainichi community. Roughly put, Confucianism was about respecting your elders. In our household, that basically translated to “the wife and child are forbidden to oppose the head of the house.” So at meals, my mother always served the old man two more dishes than herself or me. But after my parents came back from Hawaii, that number increased to four. “What’s with all the extra dishes lately?” my father asked one day after dinner, patting his bulging belly. My mother, who was in the kitchen, cleaning up, chirped, “I was hoping you’d get diabetes.

A glowing green traced the movements of our limbs below the gentle surf. I imagined a scaly, bug-eyed eel with razor-sharp teeth had come from the deep to hunt for a late-night meal before realizing it was a luminescent algae emitting a subtle glow with each tread of the water. At one point, we returned to the beach to rest and came across a nest of hatching turtles making their first voyage into the water. We watched the sun gradually peek over the horizon, and I realized in this moment that I had your mother's deepest trust. Miles away from her comfort zone, she was willing to walk with me and explore the depth of a world I had grown to love. I, in turn, would need to trust her to the utmost as I stepped deeper into her world of stand-up comedy.

They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose. 'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.' She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone. Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries.

Thank you,” I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in your eyes that find me pretty”; “May God extend your life”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; “May the next meal you cook for us be in celebration of your son’s wedding . . . of your daughter’s graduation . . . your mother’s recovery”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful. I gazed at the cityscape. Ribbons of concrete and asphalt stretched and looped under more cars than I had ever seen.

The house had a small galley kitchen where my mother performed daily miracles, stretching a handful into a potful, making the most of what we raised. Cooking mostly from memory and instinct, she took a packet of meat, a bunch of greens or a bag of peas, a couple of potatoes, a bowl of flour, a cup of cornmeal, a few tablespoons of sugar, added a smattering of this and a smidgeon of that, and produced meals of rich and complementary flavors and textures. Delicious fried chicken, pork chops, and steak, sometimes smothered with hearty gravy, the meat so tender that it fell from the bone. Cob-scraped corn pan-fried in bacon drippings, served with black-eyed peas and garnished with thick slices of fresh tomato, a handful of diced onion, and a tablespoon of sweet pickle relish. A mess of overcooked turnips simmering in neck-bone-seasoned pot liquor, nearly black—tender and delectable. The greens were minced on the plate, doused with hot pepper sauce, and served with a couple sticks of green onions and palm-sized pieces of hot-water cornbread, fried golden brown, covered with ridges from the hand that formed them, crispy shell, crumbly soft beneath.

I never leave home without my cayenne pepper. I either stash a bottle of the liquid extract in my pocket book or I stick it in the shopping cart I pull around with me all over Manhattan. When it comes to staying right side up in this world, a black woman needs at least three things. The first is a quiet spot of her own, a place away from the nonsense. The second is a stash of money, like the cash my mother kept hidden in the slit of her mattress. The last is several drops of cayenne pepper, always at the ready. Sprinkle that on your food before you eat it and it’ll kill any lurking bacteria. The powder does the trick as well, but I prefer the liquid because it hits the bloodstream quickly. Particularly when eating out, I won’t touch a morsel to my lips ‘til it’s speckled with with cayenne. That’s just one way I take care of my temple, aside from preparing my daily greens, certain other habits have carried me toward the century mark. First thing I do every morning is drink four glasses of water. People think this water business is a joke. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not. I’ve known two elderly people who died of dehydration, one of whom fell from his bed in the middle of the night and couldn’t stand up because he was so parched. Following my water, I drink 8 ounces of fresh celery blended in my Vita-mix. The juice cleanses the system and reduces inflammation. My biggest meal is my first one: oatmeal. I soak my oats overnight so that when I get up all I have to do is turn on the burner. Sometimes I enjoy them with warm almond milk, other times I add grated almonds and berries, put the mixture in my tumbler and shake it until it’s so smooth I can drink it. In any form, oats do the heart good. Throughout the day I eat sweet potatoes, which are filled with fiber, beets sprinkled with a little olive oil, and vegetables of every variety. I also still enjoy plenty of salad, though I stopped adding so many carrots – too much sugar. But I will do celery, cucumbers, seaweed grass and other greens. God’s fresh bounty doesn’t need a lot of dressing up, which is why I generally eat my salad plain. From time to time I do drizzle it with garlic oil. I love the taste. I also love lychee nuts. I put them in the freezer so that when I bite into them cold juice comes flooding out. As terrific as they are, I buy them only once in awhile. I recently bit into an especially sweet one, and then I stuck it right back in the freezer. “Not today, Suzie,” I said to myself, “full of glucose!” I try never to eat late, and certainly not after nine p.m. Our organs need a chance to rest. And before bed, of course, I have a final glass of water. I don’t mess around with my hydration.

Agape doesn’t necessarily involve high heroics, and it certainly doesn’t involve syrupy sentiment. It’s practical. It makes a difference. And it matters. It’s evident when someone cooks a nutritious meal for his children after an exhausting day at work. It’s seen when a mother takes on three or more jobs to do what it takes to keep her family clothed, housed, and fed. It’s donating blood on a regular basis to the local blood bank. It’s risking looking un-cool, and perhaps far more than that, by interrupting people as they’re telling a racist or anti-gay joke. It’s when someone decides to use the year end bonus that he received from his employer to repair the car of the struggling single mother down the street, or purchase a burial plot for someone without means, instead of buying that boat or motorcycle he’s been wanting.

Ky didn't allow her mother to have feelings, because to grant her those would mean acknowledging that she was a person who had desires and dreams beyond what Ky saw. It was easier to imagine her as a caricature, as an immigrant Cabramatta parent, whose only desire was for her children to become doctors and lawyers (or ideally both) whose only means of expressing love to them was through cooking their meals, washing their clothes, and criticizing them into being better people. And despite wanting more from her mother, despite wanting the expression of love that came with warmth and acceptance, despite wanting her mother to actually know who she was, Ky had convinced herself that it was beyond her mother's capabilities, that people from the old country simply didn't do things that way. They'd give their life for you, but good luck getting them to see you.

Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to undercooked hamburgers served at local Jack in the Box restaurants. Tests of the hamburger patties disclosed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Companies, Inc., in Arcadia, California. Nevertheless, more than seven hundred people in at least four states were sickened by Jack in the Box hamburgers, more than two hundred people were hospitalized, and four died. Most of the victims were children. One of the first to become ill, Lauren Beth Rudolph, ate a hamburger at a San Diego Jack in the Box a week before Christmas. She was admitted to the hospital on Christmas Eve, suffered terrible pain, had three heart attacks, and died in her mother’s arms on December 28, 1992. She was six years old.

We always ate with gusto...It would have offended the cook if we had nibbled or picked...Our mothers and zie [aunties] didn't inquire as to the states of our bellies; they just put the food on our plates. 'You only ask sick people if they're hungry,' my mother said. 'Everyone else must eat, eat!' But when Italians say 'Mangia! Mangia!' they're not just talking about food. They're trying to get you to stay with them, to sit by them at the table for as long as possible. The meals that my family ate together- the many courses, the time in between at the table or on the mountain by the sea, the hours spent talking loudly and passionately and unyieldingly and laughing hysterically the way Neapolitans do- were designed to prolong our time together; the food was, of course, meant to nourish us, but it was also meant to satisfy, in some deeper way, our endless hunger for one another.

Chang-bo took to his bed, or rather to the quilts on the floor that was all they had left. His legs swelled up like balloons with what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema — fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother made him as a child and an unusually delicious meal of steamed crab with ginger that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds. He had an uncanny ability to remember details of dishes she had cooked decades earlier. He was sweetly sentimental, even romantic, when he spoke about their meals together. He would take her hand in his own, his eyes wet and cloudy with the mist of his memories. “Come, darling. Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine,” he told his wife one morning when they were stirring on the blankets. They hadn’t eaten in three days. Mrs. Song looked at her husband with alarm, worried that he was hallucinating. She ran out the door to the market, moving fast and forgetting all about the pain in her back. She was determined to steal, beg — whatever it took — to get some food for her husband. She spotted her older sister selling noodles. Her sister wasn’t faring well — her skin was flaked just like Chang-bo’s from malnutrition — so Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate, and of course, her sister couldn’t refuse. “I’ll pay you back,” Mrs. Song promised as she ran back home, the adrenaline pumping her legs. Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn’t respond, she went to turn him over — it wasn’t diffcult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way. Mrs. Song pounded and pounded on his chest, screaming for help even as she knew it was too late.

You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave your mother’s big comfortable house and she won’t stop you, because she knows you too well. But listen to what she says: When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you—you’ve been raised. You know right from wrong. In every relationship you make, you’ll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptations. Remember, you can always come home. You will go home again when the world knocks you down—or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again—one of the greatest gifts along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you. Be courageous, but not foolhardy. Walk proud as you are.

Prior to my second stint in Perpignan, I was a fine diner and as I saw it, food was art. At vocational school, I was being taught how to cook, but I was frustrated by how basic the dishes were. I was like a kid who had grown up listening to Chopin, then showed up at music school, never having actually played an instrument. I mean, when you listen to Chopin all the time, you want to become Chopin. And then you go to music school and all you're doing is plunking out do...re... mi for hours at a time. It's boring as hell, and not why you enrolled. I was impatient to create great meals and not so excited about starting with the basics. Why were we spending hours learning how to hold a knife or mine a shallot when we could be making nouvelle cuisine? True, I didn't know how to cut a chicken in eight pieces or make a bechamel. But in the two- and three-start restaurants I had been to, they were way over the bechamel. Still, there I was, in school, making the most basic of dishes--salade Nicoise, potato-leek soup, an omelette.

The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift—not the worn truth that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — ​no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.

Did I regret Cyrus’s whiteness? Truth be told, sometimes I did. If Cyrus was Bengali, I wouldn’t have to explain why chewing on the end of a drumstick was perhaps the best part of a meal, or why there were outside clothes and inside clothes and in-between clothes that you wore when you got home but weren’t ready for bed. I wouldn’t have to explain all the complicated rules about where you can and can’t put your feet, and that he could maybe kiss me in front of my parents but not on the mouth and certainly never with tongue. But what I found infinitely worse was trying to gauge whether a man had just the right amount of brown in him. He had to know about drumsticks and shoes and not hate himself, but he also couldn’t be too in love with his mother or imagine that I would change more diapers than him or ever, ever be charmed by the thought of me in a hijab. He had to be three parts Tagore, one part Drake, one part e e cummings, and that’s not even getting into whether I got a rise from smelling his face. So no, I didn’t want to ponder Cyrus’s whiteness, I just wanted to enjoy his scent and his perfectly sized dick and the fact that, of all the people I had ever met in my whole life, he felt the most like home.

if they label you soft, feather weight and white-livered, if the locker room tosses back its sweaty head, and laughs at how quiet your hands stay, if they come to trample the dandelions roaring in your throat, you tell them that you were forged inside of a woman who had to survive fifteen different species of disaster to bring you here, and you didn’t come to piss on trees. you ain’t nobody’s thick-necked pitbull boy, don’t need to prove yourself worthy of this inheritance of street-corner logic, this blood legend, this index of catcalls, “three hundred ways to turn a woman into a three course meal”, this legacy of shame, and man, and pillage, and man, and rape, and man. you boy. you won’t be some girl’s slit wrists dazzling the bathtub, won’t be some girl’s, “i didn’t ask for it but he gave it to me anyway”, the torn skirt panting behind the bedroom door, some father’s excuse to polish his gun. if they say, “take what you want”, you tell them you already have everything you need; you come from scabbed knuckles and women who never stopped swinging, you come men who drank away their life savings, and men who raised daughters alone. you come from love you gotta put your back into, elbow-grease loving like slow-dancing on dirty linoleum, you come from that house of worship. boy, i dare you to hold something like that. love whatever feels most like your grandmother’s cooking. love whatever music looks best on your feet. whatever woman beckons your blood to the boiling point, you treat her like she is the god of your pulse, you treat her like you would want your father to treat me: i dare you to be that much man one day. that you would give up your seat on the train to the invisible women, juggling babies and groceries. that you would hold doors, and say thank-you, and understand that women know they are beautiful without you having to yell it at them from across the street. the day i hear you call a woman a “bitch” is the day i dig my own grave. see how you feel writing that eulogy. and if you are ever left with your love’s skin trembling under your nails, if there is ever a powder-blue heart left for dead on your doorstep, and too many places in this city that remind you of her tears, be gentle when you drape the remains of your lives in burial cloth. don’t think yourself mighty enough to turn her into a poem, or a song, or some other sweetness to soften the blow, boy, i dare you to break like that. you look too much like your mother not t

Comparing marriage to football is no insult. I come from the South where football is sacred. I would never belittle marriage by saying it is like soccer, bowling, or playing bridge, never. Those images would never work, only football is passionate enough to be compared to marriage. In other sports, players walk onto the field, in football they run onto the field, in high school ripping through some paper, in college (for those who are fortunate enough) they touch the rock and run down the hill onto the field in the middle of the band. In other sports, fans cheer, in football they scream. In other sports, players ‘high five’, in football they chest, smash shoulder pads, and pat your rear. Football is a passionate sport, and marriage is about passion. In football, two teams send players onto the field to determine which athletes will win and which will lose, in marriage two families send their representatives forward to see which family will survive and which family will be lost into oblivion with their traditions, patterns, and values lost and forgotten. Preparing for this struggle for survival, the bride and groom are each set up. Each has been led to believe that their family’s patterns are all ‘normal,’ and anyone who differs is dense, naïve, or stupid because, no matter what the issue, the way their family has always done it is the ‘right’ way. For the premarital bride and groom in their twenties, as soon as they say, “I do,” these ‘right’ ways of doing things are about to collide like two three hundred and fifty pound linemen at the hiking of the ball. From “I do” forward, if not before, every decision, every action, every goal will be like the line of scrimmage. Where will the family patterns collide? In the kitchen. Here the new couple will be faced with the difficult decision of “Where do the cereal bowls go?” Likely, one family’s is high, and the others is low. Where will they go now? In the bathroom. The bathroom is a battleground unmatched in the potential conflicts. Will the toilet paper roll over the top or underneath? Will the acceptable residing position for the lid be up or down? And, of course, what about the toothpaste? Squeeze it from the middle or the end? But the skirmishes don’t stop in the rooms of the house, they are not only locational they are seasonal. The classic battles come home for the holidays. Thanksgiving. Which family will they spend the noon meal with and which family, if close enough, will have to wait until the nighttime meal, or just dessert if at all? Christmas. Whose home will they visit first, if at all? How much money will they spend on gifts for his family? for hers? Then comes for many couples an even bigger challenge – children of their own! At the wedding, many couples take two candles and light just one often extinguishing their candle as a sign of devotion. The image is Biblical. The Bible is quoted a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one. What few prepare them for is the upcoming struggle, the conflict over the unanswered question: the two shall become one, but which one? Two families, two patterns, two ways of doing things, which family’s patterns will survive to play another day, in another generation, and which will be lost forever? Let the games begin.

Alas, great is my sorrow. Your name is Ah Chen, and when you were born I was not truly pleased. I am a farmer, and a farmer needs strong sons to help with his work, but before a year had passed you had stolen my heart. You grew more teeth, and you grew daily in wisdom, and you said 'Mommy' and 'Daddy' and your pronunciation was perfect. When you were three you would knock at the door and then you would run back and ask, 'Who is it?' When you were four your uncle came to visit and you played the host. Lifting your cup, you said, 'Ching!' and we roared with laughter and you blushed and covered your face with your hands, but I know that you thought yourself very clever. Now they tell me that I must try to forget you, but it is hard to forget you. "You carried a toy basket. You sat at a low stool to eat porridge. You repeated the Great Learning and bowed to Buddha. You played at guessing games, and romped around the house. You were very brave, and when you fell and cut your knee you did not cry because you did not think it was right. When you picked up fruit or rice, you always looked at people's faces to see if it was all right before putting it in your mouth, and you were careful not to tear your clothes. "Ah Chen, do you remember how worried we were when the flood broke our dikes and the sickness killed our pigs? Then the Duke of Ch'in raised our taxes and I was sent to plead with him, and I made him believe that we could not pay out taxes. Peasants who cannot pay taxes are useless to dukes, so he sent his soldiers to destroy our village, and thus it was the foolishness of your father that led to your death. Now you have gone to Hell to be judged, and I know that you must be very frightened, but you must try not to cry or make loud noises because it is not like being at home with your own people. "Ah Chen, do you remember Auntie Yang, the midwife? She was also killed, and she was very fond of you. She had no little girls of her own, so it is alright for you to try and find her, and to offer her your hand and ask her to take care of you. When you come before the Yama Kings, you should clasp your hands together and plead to them: 'I am young and I am innocent. I was born in a poor family, and I was content with scanty meals. I was never wilfully careless of my shoes and my clothing, and I never wasted a grain of rice. If evil spirits bully me, may thou protect me.' You should put it just that way, and I am sure that the Yama Kings will protect you. "Ah Chen, I have soup for you and I will burn paper money for you to use, and the priest is writing down this prayer that I will send to you. If you hear my prayer, will you come to see me in your dreams? If fate so wills that you must yet lead an earthly life, I pray that you will come again to your mother's womb. Meanwhile I will cry, 'Ah Chen, your father is here!' I can but weep for you, and call your name.

But over the years, of pain and distaste for what her mother had once called 'the horrible side of married life', of lonely days filled with aimless pursuits or downright boredom, of pregnancies, nurses, servants and the ordering of endless meals, it had come to seem as though she had given up of everything for not very much. She had journeyed towards this conclusion by stages hardly perceptible to herself, disguising discontent with some new activity which, as she was a perfectionist, would quickly absorb her. But when she had mastered the art, or the craft, or the technique involved in whatever it was, she realised that her boredom was intact and was simply waiting for her to stop playing with a loom, a musical instrument, a philosophy, a language, a charity or a sport and return to recognising the essential futility of her life. Then, bereft of distracton, she would relapse into a kind of despair as each pursuit betrayed her, failing to provide the raison d'être that had been her reason for taking it up in the first place.

argumentative.” “Sorry. It wasn’t on the schedule.” “Sarcasm’s also typical, but it’s unbecoming.” Susan opened her briefcase, checked the contents. “We’ll talk about all this when I get back. I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Bristoe.” “I don’t need therapy! I need a mother who listens, who gives a shit about how I feel.” “That kind of language only shows a lack of maturity and intellect.” Enraged, Elizabeth threw up her hands, spun in circles. If she couldn’t be calm and rational like her mother, she’d be wild. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” “And repetition hardly enhances. You have the rest of the weekend to consider your behavior. Your meals are in the refrigerator or freezer, and labeled. Your pack list is on your desk. Report to Ms. Vee at the university at eight on Monday morning. Your participation in this program will ensure your place in HMS next fall. Now, take my garment bag downstairs, please. My car will be here any minute.” Oh, those seeds were sprouting, cracking that fallow ground and pushing painfully through. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth looked straight

Passing the dark, low fields just south of Harrows, Smoke saw a scarecrow that reminded him, in shape, of his mother. Inspired by it, he imagined her burning. He imagined the dresses from her closet … the curls in her blond hair … the rims of her glasses … all of it and everything blistering, bending, burning. The fire he imagined for her was blue and smelled like childhood. And childhood reminded him of the children he once knew; he imagined a girl named Merrily melted to the shape of a chair, another, Henry, sitting upon her in a classroom. He'd like to burn them all. Every face he'd ever seen. Excited now, Smoke saw the mothers of these former schoolmates rushing from their homes, desperate feet pattering on the porch boards, able to discern the smell of their own child burning above all others. Smoke would be there when they came. He'd be there with a piece of meat on a stick. Dinner over childhood's fire. Hey, Ma! This meat only gets better the longer it cooks! Moved, Smoke imagined more. Men in suits bursting into flame upon exiting church. Families sitting down to eat burnt food, blackened bread, ashen meals upon scalding-hot plates. Come on, Billy! Eat your fire! EAT YOUR FIRE!

I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something’s meal. What was her—green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs—would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed. Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself—those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison’s last words were: “It’s very beautiful over there.” I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful.

Yet Laudan’s mother had no choice about whether to be a good cook or not. It was simply what was expected of her, and of every other farmer’s wife in England at that time. She did not cook because she ‘loved’ cooking but because this was the role that life had allotted her. There was nothing unusual in the way that Laudan’s mother cooked. If anything, her life in the kitchen was easy by the standards of the day. At least a farmer’s wife had access to plentiful meat and vegetables, whereas city cooks in early twentieth-century Britain were expected to produce the same quantity of meals but with meagre ingredients and limited equipment, often in single-room dwellings where there was no kitchen and no escape from cooking. We idealise the homespun meals of the past, imagining rosy-cheeked women laying down picturesque bottles of peaches and plums. But much of the art of ‘cooking’ in pre-modern times was a harried mother slinging what she could in a pot and engaging in a daily smoke-filled battle to keep a fire alive and under control, on top of all the other chores she had to manage. Before we offer too many lamentations for the cookery of the past, we should remember how hard it was – and still is, for millions of people – to cook when you have no choice in the matter.

Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for. Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.

If the queen catches you in here again, Princess, she'll sentence you to do the dishes right alongside me! she heard another voice ring out. No one was there, but Snow knew the voice. It was Mrs. Kindred, the cook who had survived her aunt's dismissals over the years. When Snow's mother was alive, she'd encouraged her daughter to be friendly with those who helped them in the castle, and Mrs. Kindred had always been Snow's favorite person to chat with. She could see herself sitting on a chair, no more than six or seven, watching Mrs. Kindred chop onions, carrots, and leeks and throw them all into a giant pot of broth. She and Mrs. Kindred only stole a few moments together most days now- she suspected her aunt must have forbidden the cook from talking to her, what with how Mrs. Kindred always quickly sent Snow on her way- but back then she had always peppered the cook with questions. ("How do you cut the carrots so small? Why do leeks have sand in them? What spices are you going to add? How do you know how much to put in?") On one such occasion, she'd been such a distraction that Mrs. Kindred had finally picked her up, holding her high on her broad chest, and let her stir the pot herself. Eventually, she taught her how to dice and chop, too, since Snow wouldn't stop talking. By suppertime, young Snow had convinced herself she'd made the whole meal. She had been proud, too, carrying the dishes out to the dining table that night.

You know,” I said, “you don’t owe New Fiddleham anything. You don’t need to help them.” “Look,” Charlie said as we clipped past Market Street. He was pointing at a man delicately painting enormous letters onto a broad window as we passed. NONNA SANTORO’S, it read, although the RO’S was still just an outline. “That Italian restaurant?” “Yes,” he smiled. “They will be opening their doors for the first time very soon. Sweet family. I bought my first meal in New Fiddleham from that man. A couple of meatballs from a street cart were about all I could afford at the time. He’s an immigrant, too. He’s going to do well. His red sauce is amazing.” “That’s grand for him, then,” I said. “I like it when doors open,” said Charlie. “Doors are opening in New Fiddleham every day. It is a remarkable time to be alive anywhere, really. Do you think our parents could ever have imagined having machines that could wash dishes, machines that could sew, machines that do laundry? Pretty soon we’ll be taking this trolley ride without any horses. I’ve heard that Glanville has electric streetcars already. Who knows what will be possible fifty years from now, or a hundred. Change isn’t always so bad.” “Your optimism is both baffling and inspiring,” I said. “The sun is rising,” he replied with a little chuckle. I glanced at the sky. It was well past noon. “It’s just something my sister and I used to say,” he clarified. “I think you would like Alina. You often remind me of her. She has a way of refusing to let the world keep her down.” He smiled and his gaze drifted away, following the memory. “Alina found a rolled-up canvas once,” he said, “a year or so after our mother passed away. It was an oil painting—a picture of the sun hanging low over a rippling ocean. She was a beautiful painter, our mother. I could tell that it was one of hers, but I had never seen it before. It felt like a message, like she had sent it, just for us to find. “I said that it was a beautiful sunset, and Alina said no, it was a sunrise. We argued about it, actually. I told her that the sun in the picture was setting because it was obviously a view from our camp near Gelendzhik, overlooking the Black Sea. That would mean the painting was looking to the west. “Alina said that it didn’t matter. Even if the sun is setting on Gelendzhik, that only means that it is rising in Bucharest. Or Vienna. Or Paris. The sun is always rising somewhere. From then on, whenever I felt low, whenever I lost hope and the world felt darkest, Alina would remind me: the sun is rising.” “I think I like Alina already. It’s a heartening philosophy. I only worry that it’s wasted on this city.” “A city is just people,” Charlie said. “A hundred years from now, even if the roads and buildings are still here, this will still be a whole new city. New Fiddleham is dying, every day, but it is also being constantly reborn. Every day, there is new hope. Every day, the sun rises. Every day, there are doors opening.” I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “When we’re through saving the world,” I said, “you can take me out to Nonna Santoro’s. I have it on good authority that the red sauce is amazing.” He blushed pink and a bashful smile spread over his face. “When we’re through saving the world, Miss Rook, I will hold you to that.

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS A MAN CAN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A MOTHER A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK A SINGLE EVENT CAN HAVE INFINITELY MANY INTERPRETATIONS A SOLID HOME BASE BUILDS A SENSE OF SELF A STRONG SENSE OF DUTY IMPRISONS YOU ABSOLUTE SUBMISSION CAN BE A FORM OF FREEDOM ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE ACTION CAUSES MORE TROUBLE THAN THOUGHT ALIENATION PRODUCES ECCENTRICS OR REVOLUTIONARIES ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED AMBITION IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS COMPLACENCY AMBIVALENCE CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE AN ELITE IS INEVITABLE ANGER OR HATE CAN BE A USEFUL MOTIVATING FORCE ANIMALISM IS PERFECTLY HEALTHY ANY SURPLUS IS IMMORAL ANYTHING IS A LEGITIMATE AREA OF INVESTIGATION ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH AT TIMES INACTIVITY IS PREFERABLE TO MINDLESS FUNCTIONING AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND AUTOMATION IS DEADLY AWFUL PUNISHMENT AWAITS REALLY BAD PEOPLE BAD INTENTIONS CAN YIELD GOOD RESULTS BEING ALONE WITH YOURSELF IS INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR BEING HAPPY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING ELSE BEING JUDGMENTAL IS A SIGN OF LIFE BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU'RE A FOOL BELIEVING IN REBIRTH IS THE SAME AS ADMITTING DEFEAT BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS CALM IS MORE CONDUCIVE TO CREATIVITY THAN IS ANXIETY CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING CHANGE IS VALUABLE WHEN THE OPPRESSED BECOME TYRANTS CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY CHILDREN ARE THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE CHILDREN ARE THE MOST CRUEL OF ALL CLASS ACTION IS A NICE IDEA WITH NO SUBSTANCE CLASS STRUCTURE IS AS ARTIFICIAL AS PLASTIC CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST CRIME AGAINST PROPERTY IS RELATIVELY UNIMPORTANT DECADENCE CAN BE AN END IN ITSELF DECENCY IS A RELATIVE THING DEPENDENCE CAN BE A MEAL TICKET DESCRIPTION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN METAPHOR DEVIANTS ARE SACRIFICED TO INCREASE GROUP SOLIDARITY DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS DISORGANIZATION IS A KIND OF ANESTHESIA DON'T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES DREAMING WHILE AWAKE IS A FRIGHTENING CONTRADICTION DYING AND COMING BACK GIVES YOU CONSIDERABLE PERSPECTIVE DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL ELABORATION IS A FORM OF POLLUTION EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE AS VALUABLE AS INTELLECTUAL RESPONSES ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY ENSURE THAT YOUR LIFE STAYS IN FLUX EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU EVERY ACHIEVEMENT REQUIRES A SACRIFICE EVERYONE'S WORK IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT EVERYTHING THAT'S INTERESTING IS NEW EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL CONCESSIONS EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID EXPRESSING ANGER IS NECESSARY EXTREME BEHAVIOR HAS ITS BASIS IN PATHOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY EXTREME SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO PERVERSION FAITHFULNESS IS A SOCIAL NOT A BIOLOGICAL LAW FAKE OR REAL INDIFFERENCE IS A POWERFUL PERSONAL WEAPON FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE FEAR IS THE GREATEST INCAPACITATOR FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY GIVING FREE REIN TO YOUR EMOTIONS IS AN HONEST WAY TO LIVE GO ALL OUT IN ROMANCE AND LET THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY GOING WITH THE FLOW IS SOOTHING BUT RISKY GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE GRASS ROOTS AGITATION IS THE ONLY HOPE

She told everything as quickly as she could, stringing sentences together the way she had when she was a little girl. By the end of the tale,she found herself defending her mother,angry at the world that made it necessary for her to explain.Impulsively, she grabbed a curry comb and began to brush Red Star's coat vigorously.She brushed for a long time,and tears began to blur her vision.She tried to resign herself to what seemed to be happening.Then a hand covered hers and squeezed affectionately. Mac took the curry comb away,and bent to kiss the back of her hand. "So,Miss King,will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the social next Friday evening at the Congregational Church?" Miss King embarrassed herself by saying yes! so loudly that the dozing horse in the stall next to Red Star jumped and kicked the side of his stall in fright.The two young people laughed, and MacKenzie lifted LisBeth into the air and swung her around in his arms. Sick with apprehension,Jesse had been unable to remain alone for long.She returned to the kitchen to help Augustus with meal preparations, praying earnestly for LisBeth and MacKenzie while she worked.When the two young people burst through the kitchen door together,their happy smiles told the older women all they needed to know. LisBeth was sobered when she saw her Mother. "Mother,I..." Jesse held up a hand to stop her. "It's all right,LisBeth. I'm glad everything turned out.I've been praying for you both." "Mother,all four of us know about Papa. Would you tell me a story about him while we make supper?" The culprit never came forward, but at some time that evening, the first book-burning in the State of Nebraska took place. Francis Day's Memoirs of the Savage West found its way into Augusta's cook stove.

Well, I saved you today, didn’t I? Just like I saved you before. You walked out of the Bastion free, without a scratch, and if any Cokyrian but me had caught you with that dagger, you might be drawn and quartered by now.” “You didn’t save me from that butcher,” I said irritably. “But you’re right. About today, I mean.” I could sense his satisfaction, which irritated me all the more. “So accept my thanks, but stay away from me. We’re not friends, you know.” I was nearing my neighborhood and didn’t want anyone to see me with him. He stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. “We’re not friends yet. But you’ve thought about it. And you just thanked me.” “Are you delusional?” “No. You just said thank you to the faceless Cokyrian soldier who arrested you.” “Don’t you ever stop?” I demanded, trying in vain to move around him. “I haven’t even started.” “What does that mean?” There was silence as Saadi glanced up and down the street. “I want to know where you got that dagger. Or at least what story you told.” “Why don’t you ask Commander Narian? The two of you seemed fairly close.” “Quit making jokes.” “I haven’t made a single one.” “Well?” “It was my father’s,” I said, clinging to the lie Queen Alera had provided, whether by mistake or not. “Oh.” This seemed to take Saadi aback. “And now, because of you, I don’t have it anymore.” I knew I was pressing my luck, but I wanted to make him feel bad. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, seeming sincere enough. Thinking I had maybe, finally, succeeded in getting him to leave me alone, I stepped around him. “Shaselle?” I stopped again, without the slightest idea why. “Your father--what was he like?” The question shocked me; I also wasn’t sure I could answer it without crying. But Saadi appeared so genuinely interested that I couldn’t disregard him. “You have no right to ask me that,” I answered out of principle. “But for your information, he was the strongest, bravest, kindest and best-humored man I ever knew. And none of it was because he took what was handed to him.” For the second time, I attempted a dramatic departure. “Shaselle?” “What now?” I incredulously exclaimed. “Do you have plans tomorrow?” “What?” “I have a day off duty. We could--” “No!” I shouted. “What is this? You expect me to spend a day with you, a Cokyrian--a Cokyrian I can’t stand?” “Yes,” he affirmed, despite my outburst. I laughed in disbelief. “I won’t. This is ridiculous. You’re ridiculous. Enjoy your time off duty with your own kind.” Turning, I sprinted down the street, and though he called after me yet again, I ignored him. As I neared my house, I glanced behind once or twice to assure myself he wasn’t following. He was nowhere in sight. I reached the security of my home just in time for dinner, and just in time to cut off Mother’s growing displeasure--the first step in her progression to anger. I smiled at her, hurried to wash, and was a perfect lady throughout the meal. Afterward I retired to my room, picking a book from my shelf to occupy me until my eyes drooped. Instead of words on pages, however, I kept seeing Saadi’s face--his clear blue eyes, that irritating hair, those freckles across his nose that made me lose willpower. What if I had offended him earlier? He had only asked to spend time with me, and I had mocked him. But he was Cokyrian. It was ludicrous for him to be pursuing my company. It was dangerous for me to be in his. And that, I suddenly realized, was part of the reason I very much wanted to be with him. Saadi aggravated me, confused me, scared me, and yet I could no longer deny that he intrigued me in a way no one else ever had.

He swore, raked his hands through his hair and tried to pinpoint the moment she'd so neatly turned the tables on him, when the pursued had become the pursuer. "I don't like forward women." The sound she made was something between a snort and a giggle, and was girlish and full of fun. It made him want to grin. "Now that's a lie, and you don't do it well. I've noticed you're an honest sort of man, Brian. When you don't want to speak your mind, you say nothing-and that's not often. I like that about you,even if it did irritate me initially.I even like your slightly overwide streak of confidence. I admire your patience and dedication to the horses, your undertstanding and affection for them. I've never been involved with a man who's shared that interest with me." "You've never been involved with a man at all." "Exactly.That's just one reason why. And to continue, I appreciate the kindness you showed my mother when she was sad,and I appreciate the part of you that's struggling to back away right now instead of taking what I've never offered anyone before." She laid a hand on his arm as he stared at her with baffled frustration. "If I didn't have that respect and that liking for you,Brian,we wouldn't be having this conversation no matter how attracted I might be to you." "Sex complicates things, Keeley." "I know." "How would you know? You've never had any." She gave his arm a quick squeeze. "Good point.So,you want to try the tack room?" When his mouth fell open, she laughed and threw her arms around him for a noisy kiss on his cheek. "Just kidding.Let's go up to the main house and have some dinnre instead." "i've work yet." She drew back. She couldn't read his eyes now. "Brian, neither of us have eaten. We can have a simple meal in the kitchen-and if you're worried, we won't be alone in the house so I'll have to keep my hands off you. Temporarily.

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

Step 6. Ensure That Your Environment Supports Your Goals Some people subscribe to the philosophy that if the cure doesn’t hurt, it can’t be working. When it comes to permanent changes in diet and lifestyle, the opposite philosophy is the best: The less painful the program, the more likely it is to succeed. Take steps to make your new life easier. Modify your daily behavior so that your surroundings work for you, not against you. Have the right pots, pans, and utensils to cook with; have the right spices, herbs, and seasonings to make your meals delicious; have your cookbooks handy and review them often to make your dishes lively and appealing. Make sure you give yourself the time to shop for food and cook your meals. Change your life to support your health. Don’t sacrifice your health for worthless conveniences. Avoid temptation. Very few people could quit smoking without ridding their house of cigarettes. Alcoholics avoid bars to stop drinking. Protect yourself by protecting your environment. Decrease the time when you are exposed to rich foods to avoid testing your “willpower.” One of the best ways to do this is to throw all the rich foods out of the house. Just as important is to replace harmful foods with those used in the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss. If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible. Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she’ll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

Much to Sophie’s extreme lack of surprise, Benedict showed up at his mother’s home the following morning for breakfast. Sophie should have been able to avoid him completely, except that he was loitering in the hall as she tried to make her way down to the kitchen, where she planned to take her morning meal with the rest of the servants. “And how was your first night at Number Five, Bruton Street?” he inquired, his smile lazy and masculine. “Splendid,” Sophie replied, stepping aside so that she might make a clean half circle around him. But as she stepped to her left, he stepped to his right, effectively blocking her path. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he said smoothly. Sophie stepped back to her right. “I was,” she said pointedly. Benedict was far too debonair to step back to his left, but he somehow managed to turn and lean against a table in just the right way to once again block her movement. “Have you been given a tour of the house?” he asked. “By the housekeeper.” “And of the grounds?” “There are no grounds.” He smiled, his brown eyes warm and melting. “There’s a garden.” “About the size of a pound note,” she retorted. “Nonetheless . . .” “Nonetheless,” Sophie cut in, “I have to eat breakfast.” He stepped gallantly aside. “Until next time,” he murmured. And Sophie had the sinking feeling that next time would come quickly indeed. Thirty minutes later, Sophie edged slowly out of the kitchen, half-expecting Benedict to jump out at her from around a corner. Well, maybe not half-expecting. Judging from the way she couldn’t quite breathe, she was probably whole-expecting. But he wasn’t there. She inched forward. Surely he would come bounding down the stairs at any moment, ambushing her with his very presence. Still no Benedict. Sophie opened her mouth, then bit her tongue when she realized she’d been about to call out his name. “Stupid girl,” she muttered. “Who’s stupid?” Benedict asked. “Surely not you.” Sophie nearly jumped a foot. “Where did you come from?” she demanded, once she’d almost caught her breath. He pointed to an open doorway. “Right there,” he answered, his voice all innocence. “So now you’re jumping out at me from closets?” “Of course not.” He looked affronted. “That was a staircase.” Sophie peered around him. It was the side staircase. The servants’ staircase. Certainly not anyplace a family member would just happen to be walking. “Do you often creep down the side staircase?” she asked, crossing her arms. He leaned forward, just close enough to make her slightly uncomfortable, and, although she would never admit it to anyone, barely even herself, slightly excited. “Only when I want to sneak up on someone.” -Benedict & Sophie

With a twist of her neck, Saphira tossed the snail into the air, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and swallowed the creature whole, bobbing her head twice as she did, like a robin eating an earthworm. Lowering his gaze, Eragon saw four more giant snails farther down upon the rise. One of the creatures had retreated within its shell; the others were hurrying away upon their undulating, skirtlike bellies. “Over there!” shouted Eragon. Saphira leaped forward. Her entire body left the ground for a moment, and then she landed upon all fours and snapped up first one, then two, then three of the snails. She did not eat the last snail, the one hiding in its shell, but drew back her head and bathed it in a stream of blue and yellow flame that lit up the land for hundreds of feet in every direction. She maintained the flame for no more than a second or two; then she picked up the smoking, steaming snail between her jaws--as gently as a mother cat picking up a kitten--carried it over to Eragon, and dropped it at his feet. He eyed it with distrust, but it appeared well and truly dead. Now you can have a proper breakfeast, said Saphira. He stared at her, then began to laugh--and he kept laughing until he was doubled over, resting his hands on his knees and heaving for breath. What is so amusing? she asked, and sniffed the soot-blackened shell. Yes, why do you laugh, Eragon? asked Glaedr. He shook his head and continued to wheeze. At last he was able to say, “Because--” And then he shifted to speaking with his mind so that Glaedr would hear as well. Because…snail and eggs! And he began to giggle again, feeling very silly. Because, snail steaks!...Hungry? Have a stalk! Feeling tired? Eat an eyeball! Who needs mead when you have slime?! I could put the stalks in a cup, like a bunch of flowers, and they would… He was laughing so hard, he found it impossible to continue, and he dropped to one knee while he gasped for air, tears of mirth streaming from his eyes. Saphira parted her jaws in a toothy approximation of a smile, and she made a soft choking sound in her throat. You are very odd sometimes, Eragon. He could feel his merriment infecting her. She sniffed the shell again. Some mead would be nice. “At least you ate,” he said, both with his mind and his tongue. Not enough, but enough to return to the Varden. As his laughter subsided, Eragon poked at the snail with the tip of his boot. It’s been so long since there were dragons on Vroengard, it must not have realized what you were and thought to make an easy meal of me…That would have been a sorry death indeed, to end up as dinner for a snail. But memorable, said Saphira. But memorable, he agreed, feeling his mirth return. And what did I say is the first law of hunting, younglings? asked Glaedr. Together Eragon and Saphira replied, Do not stalk your prey until you are sure that it is prey. Very good, said Glaedr.