Spent Sunday Quotes

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Every life has a soundtrack. There is a tune that makes me think of the summer I spent rubbing baby oil on my stomach in pursuit of the perfect tan. There's another that reminds me of tagging along with my father on Sunday morning to pick up the New York Times. There's the song that reminds me of using fake ID to get into a nightclub; and the one that brings back my cousin Isobel's sweet sixteen, where I played Seven Minutes in Heaven with a boy whose breath smelled like tomato soup. If you ask me, music is the language of memory.

The library was home away from home to my mom, and my family. We had spent every Sunday afternoon there since I was a little boy, wandering around the stacks, pulling out every book with a picture of a pirate ship, a knight, a soldier, or an astronaut. My mom used to say, "This is my church, Ethan. This is how we keep the Sabbath holy in our family.

Honestly, I never really understood the glorification of Fridays & weekends. I don't want to build a life and career, where I spent five days a week waiting for the weekend. No! I want to enjoy my life, and don't wish any weekday away. I want each day to matter to me, in some way, even if it's a small tiny way. I love my life. Everyday. That's the spirit we should convey all around us.

When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality.

You attract poverty when you lack value for time

I don’t feel pressure, either. I don’t give a toss about it. I spent the afternoon of Sunday, July 9, 2006, in Berlin sleeping and playing the PlayStation. In the evening, I went out and won the World Cup.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

Let the Good vibe Sunday well spent to bring us a week of content.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

I don't get it?" she asked "I don't get it? Let me tell you something about what I get. You think you're so smart? I spent three years on a full academic scholarship at the best college-prep school in the country. And when they kicked me out I had to petition-petition!-to keep them from wiping out my four-point-oh transcript." Daniel moved away, but Luce pursued him, taking a step forward for every wide-eyed step he took back. Probably freaking him out, but so what? He'd been asking for it every time he condescended to her. "I know Latin and French, and in middle school, I won the science fair three years in a row." She had backed him up against the railing of the boardwalk and was trying to restrain herself from poking him in the chest with her finger. She wasn't finished. "I also do the Sunday crossword puzzle, sometimes in under an hour. I have an unerringly good sense of direction... though not always when it comes to guys." She swallowed and took a moment to catch her breath. "And someday, I'm going to be a psychiatrist who actually listens to her patients and helps people. Okay? So don't keep talking to me like I'm stupid and don't tell me I don't understand just because I can't decode your erratic, flaky, hot-one-minute-cold-the-next, frankly"-she looked up at him, letting out her breath-"really hurtful behavior." She brushed a tear away, angry with herself for getting so worked up.

A long night spent with your most obvious weakness You start shaking at the thought you are everything I want Because you are everything I’m not

Joblessness is a time for reflection

The only thing you have to show for a wasted or spent time is that you just realize that you are getting older.

The life of a plural wife, she'd found, was a life lived under constant comparison, a life spent wondering. Sitting across from her sister-wives at Sunday dinner, the platters and serving dishes floating past like hovercraft, the questions were almost inescapable; Who of us is the most happy? Which of us is his one true love? Who does he desire the most?

Back in Paris they had happy moments together, like stills from a perfume ad (dashing hand in hand down the steps of Montmartre; or suddenly revealed in motionless embrace on the Pont des Arts by the lights of a bateau-mouche as it turned). There were the Sunday afternoon half-arguments, too, the moments of silence when bodies curl up beneath the sheets on the long shores of silence and apathy where life founders. Annabelle's studio was so dark they had to turn on the lights at four in the afternoon. They sometimes were sad, but mostly they were serious. Both of them knew that this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together. They had a great respect and a profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse the end.

to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking in the fields?

I went after Beau Sunday. I knew I’d find him at the bar shooting pool. It’s where he always goes to unwind. When I got there we said a few things and threw a few punches.” Sawyer glanced over at me and smirked. “I’d like to say Beau looked worse but we both know I’d be lying. I might have the throwing arm when it comes to football, but he has me beat when it comes to throwing punches. Fact is, he could have really put a hurting on me. He spent most of the time blocking my punches.” Sawyer stopped and let out a frustrated sigh.

The amount of time spent doing something is what adds value to it

Investing time in adding value to yourself is the best way to invest time

Getting fired from work is not a death sentence

You kill the biggest possible resource when you waste time

Use time to create the nature of God in yourself

The world saw me as colored, but I didn't spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black. Because I had a white father, because I'd been in white Sunday school, I got along with the white kids, but I didn't belong with the white kids. I wasn't a part of their tribe. But the black kids embraced me. "Come along," they said. "You're rolling with us." With the black kids, I wasn't constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was.

People had always amazed him, he began. But they amazed him more since the sickness. For as long as the two of them had been together, he said, Gary’s mother had accepted him as her son’s lover, had given them her blessing. Then, at the funeral, she’d barely acknowledged him. Later, when she drove to the house to retrieve some personal things, she’d hunted through her son’s drawers with plastic bags twist-tied around her wrists. “…And yet,” he whispered, “The janitor at school--remember him? Mr. Feeney? --he’d openly disapproved of me for nineteen years. One of the nastiest people I knew. Then when the news about me got out, after I resigned, he started showing up at the front door every Sunday with a coffee milkshake. In his church clothes, with his wife waiting out in the car. People have sent me hate mail, condoms, Xeroxed prayers…” What made him most anxious, he told me, was not the big questions--the mercilessness of fate, the possibility of heaven. He was too exhausted, he said, to wrestle with those. But he’d become impatient with the way people wasted their lives, squandered their chances like paychecks. I sat on the bed, massaging his temples, pretending that just the right rubbing might draw out the disease. In the mirror I watched us both--Mr. Pucci, frail and wasted, a talking dead man. And myself with the surgical mask over my mouth, to protect him from me. “The irony,” he said, “… is that now that I’m this blind man, it’s clearer to me than it’s ever been before. What’s the line? ‘Was blind but now I see…’” He stopped and put his lips to the plastic straw. Juice went halfway up the shaft, then back down again. He motioned the drink away. “You accused me of being a saint a while back, pal, but you were wrong. Gary and I were no different. We fought…said terrible things to each other. Spent one whole weekend not speaking to each other because of a messed up phone message… That time we separated was my idea. I thought, well, I’m fifty years old and there might be someone else out there. People waste their happiness--That’s what makes me sad. Everyone’s so scared to be happy.” “I know what you mean,” I said. His eyes opened wider. For a second he seemed to see me. “No you don’t,” he said. “You mustn’t. He keeps wanting to give you his love, a gift out and out, and you dismiss it. Shrug it off because you’re afraid.” “I’m not afraid. It’s more like…” I watched myself in the mirror above the sink. The mask was suddenly a gag. I listened. “I’ll give you what I learned from all this,” he said. “Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

up in Pacific Grove, a coastal town on the Monterey Peninsula in California, I had spent many Sunday mornings combing beaches, hunting for sea glass. I once believed the surf-tumbled glass had come from mermaids when the mythical creatures wept for sailors lost at sea, their tears hardened and washed ashore by the latest storm front. Mermaid tears were treasure, meant to be guarded close to one’s heart. They brought wishes of true love and kept you safe

To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes." She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. She made it with infinite care, and hung it to the slightly careening mantel over the stove in the kitchen. She studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear. Afterwards the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins.

I spent most of Sunday listening to Dee and Kat talk about books and how book boyfriends were universally better than real boyfriends while they sat in the living room. And since I was a guy, maybe not human, I really wanted to disagree with that statement, but once they started listing the attributes of some of these dudes in the books Kat carried around with her, there was no way anyone could compete with that. I felt like I needed to warn Adam or something.

I do not go to church. I don’t go to Christian church or Jew church or any other church. I don’t go to church at all. Not ever. A perfect Sunday for me is spent drinking green tea while reading the Sunday New York Times. Yikes! Why don’t I just turn in my Al-Qaeda membership form and call it a day? As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only do I not go to church: I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God? How can I spend our American currency which pledges “In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But I don’t, which to many people is the same as not believing in America. Up until recently, I thought those people were lunatics.

Time spent effectively can be compensated

Knowing what to do with time is the key to being productive

Time is a rare resource and must be invested wisely

Control yourself every passing second and make sure that no unit of time is being wasted

Getting fired from work is not a tragedy

Never allow a minute to pass without asking yourself what you did with the time

Find solitude and discover ways to add value to yourself

For every day spent at a job, you empty your life

Convert everything around you into meaningful products

Any time that is spent or wasted is a life wasted or spent.

Any life wasted or spent is gone and it will never come back.

Our possessions are dictating our free time. Sundays used to be for relaxing and eating, and now they're spent cleaning the garage.

Life can be spent in an atmosphere of continuous encouragement, you will ignore the complex and it will disappear

The energy that is necessary for us to achieve the goal is spent on meaningless anxiety

All energy given to us for the achievements of goals and self-actualization is instead spent on deriving acceptance from our surroundings and compliance with the requirements of the society

The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio. Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio—or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them—and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.

For the liquor of Miss Amelia has a special quality of its own. It is clean and sharp on the tongue, but once down a man it glows inside him for a long time afterward. And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man – then the worth of Miss Amelia's liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. A spinner who has thought only of the loom, the dinner pail, the bed, and then the loom again – this spinner might drink some on a Sunday and come across a marsh lily. And in his palm he might hold this flower, examining the golden dainty cup, and in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January sky, and a deep fright at his own smallness stop his heart. Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk Miss Amelia's liquor. He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy – but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.

Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.

He told me that he spent Saturdays and Sundays and all his days off there. “With my wife, of course,” he added. Just then his wife was laughing with Marie. For the first time maybe, I really thought I was going to get married.

Malcolm spent much of May speaking to large crowds at church meetings and Sunday rallies, repeatedly emphasizing that the Muslims were not at war with the police, but rather that the police were at war with the Black community as a whole.

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he'd spent the week on and knew so well he hardly need to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it.

What a skeletal wreck of man this is. Translucent flesh and feeble bones, the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes. Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear. When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at a laundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now. We all have a little sin that needs venting, virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are ripped from the branches of office, do you know where your post entails? Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve? When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned. For the rest of us, there is always Sunday. The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath, so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book. To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers. A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life and counting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube, and hope you get a taste. WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP! I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we? Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do, and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs, haven’t felt like this in years. The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go, and punch me into the dead spout again. That’s where you go when there’s no one else around, it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there? Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse, and a finger on the trigger. CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT! Government is another way to say better…than…you. It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick, it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food, but you can’t touch the silverware. Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for. Humph, isn’t that sweet? And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way, and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little, when your gaffer taped in the middle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening. SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I’m sorry, I could go on and on but their times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident. Forget the freak, your just nature. Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort, and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run. Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done.

Seattle. I’ve never seen a city so overrun with runaways, drug addicts, and bums. Pike Place Market: they’re everywhere. Pioneer Square: teeming with them. The flagship Nordstrom: have to step over them on your way in. The first Starbucks: one of them hogging the milk counter because he’s sprinkling free cinnamon on his head. Oh, and they all have pit bulls, many of them wearing handwritten signs with witticisms such as I BET YOU A DOLLAR YOU’LL READ THIS SIGN. Why does every beggar have a pit bull? Really, you don’t know? It’s because they’re badasses, and don’t you forget it. I was downtown early one morning and I noticed the streets were full of people pulling wheelie suitcases. And I thought, Wow, here’s a city full of go-getters. Then I realized, no, these are all homeless bums who have spent the night in doorways and are packing up before they get kicked out. Seattle is the only city where you step in shit and you pray, Please God, let this be dog shit. Anytime you express consternation as to how the U.S. city with more millionaires per capita than any other would allow itself to be overtaken by bums, the same reply always comes back. “Seattle is a compassionate city.” A guy named the Tuba Man, a beloved institution who’d play his tuba at Mariners games, was brutally murdered by a street gang near the Gates Foundation. The response? Not to crack down on gangs or anything. That wouldn’t be compassionate. Instead, the people in the neighborhood redoubled their efforts to “get to the root of gang violence.” They arranged a “Race for the Root,” to raise money for this dunderheaded effort. Of course, the “Race for the Root” was a triathlon, because God forbid you should ask one of these athletic do-gooders to partake in only one sport per Sunday.

Chaplin left the Keystone studios on a Saturday night in December after cutting his last film, without bidding farewell to any of his erstwhile colleagues; he spent Sunday in his room at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and on the following day he turned up for work at the Essanay Studios in Niles, California. Of course, everyone at Keystone knew about his imminent departure, but he could not bring himself to make a speech or shake hands. He just left. Sennett said later that 'as for Charles Spencer Chaplin, I am not at all sure that we know him'. He had never really been part of the team; he would never become a member of any group.

that all danger carried the faint trace of comfort, all wrongs the hint of what may be right. How else to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking

that all danger carried the faint trace of comfort, all wrongs the hint of what may be right. How else to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking in the fields?

If you've ever taught a Sunday school class, led a small group, or taught a Bible study, you know there's a lot more behind these words than what appears on the surface. You know that you don't just get up before a group and teach the Word of God with power and effectiveness apart from a lot of time spent in preparation-not just preparation of the notes and the material, but preperation of your heart and life.

One day in the spring of 1894 or so, Amanda Cobb looked out her kitchen window and saw Tyrus and a bunch of Negro boys merrily hauling a cart laden with scrap metal, broken furniture, and other things they’d found in backyards and vacant lots around town. They were headed toward the junkyard to try to make a few dollars, and Mrs. Cobb knew for what. “He was always thinking up ways of earning money to buy baseball supplies,” she would tell a writer for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Sunday Union and Republican in 1928. “He was always playing when he was a child. In fact, we had a hard time getting him to go to school. I remember that the first money he earned he spent for a mitt. He couldn’t have been more than six years old when a neighbor asked him to take his cow to the pasture and gave Ty some change for doing it. Ty didn’t buy candy or ice cream. He knew what he wanted, and he got it—a baseball glove.

After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.

Climate change is not a hot topic. As author Bill McKibben points out in a post on TomDispatch.com, in 2011, “ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming.” He documents that over the last three years, a mere ninety-eight minutes of prime-time television news was devoted to covering this global challenge. In fact, in 2011, the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of time on climate change— all of it given over to Republican politicians focused on denying it.

But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness. The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit.

So, if you suddenly experienced a financial windfall, you would ultimately be much happier if you spent the money on numerous pleasant, mood-boosting things occurring on a day-to-day or weekly basis—a daily lunch of expensive sushi, a weekly massage, a regular delivery of fresh flowers, or Sunday-morning calls to your best friend in Europe—rather than spend it all on a single big-ticket item that you believe you would really love, like a new top-of-the-line Jaguar or the remodeling of a bathroom with hand-painted tile.

Now for some hope. It's Easter Sunday. The day that is usually spent with family and friends. This year is more chill. That's all. Just hanging out by staying in. ON the other side of this we will all talk about this time. It will be like where you were for the great quake of 1989 or 9-11 or where you were when JFK was shot. It's going to be one of those kinds of moments. BUT the we made it through those times. We will make it through this. We are stronger together. Plus we will have a big Easter together next year! This year let's all just chill in place.

The virtues of mass production are seductive. Speed. Productivity. Growth. But the labor my students are preparing for is slow and inefficient. Most of the week will be spent trying to offer kindness to a deacon who never liked you, or weeding heresies out of the Sunday school material you bought online. You'll spend days coming up with enough beauty and truth to fill an hour on Sunday only to receive a dozen comments from parishioners about how much they miss the old pastor on their way out the door. If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

My general feeling is that date make-up should be an honest advertisement for a potential relationship. Frankly, it’s easier for you that way. There’s no point labouring over lots of perfectly applied make-up if you are, in reality, a low-maintenance kind of girl who can’t possibly keep it up beyond the honeymoon period. Equally, it seems unwise to imply you’re someone who rolls out of bed and out to a Sunday farmer’s market all natural skin, flushed cheeks and a smidge of lip balm when your real life is spent in full coverage foundation and smoky eyes. Like any part of dating, it is always safer to be yourself because who can maintain a lie for long?

I can't remember when I've spent a more...enjoyable Saturday." She sighed, then teased his tongue with hers. "Since I don't intend to move for at least twenty-four hours,we'll see how you like Sunday as well." "I think I'm going to love it." She slid a hand over his shoulder. "I don't like to be pushy, Senator, but when are you going to marry me?" "I thought September in Hyannis Port." "The MacGregor fortess." He saw by her eyes the idea appealed to hre. "But September's two and a half months away." "We'll make it August," he said as he nibbled at her ear. "In the meantime, you and your roommates can move in here, or we can start looking for another place. Would you like to honeymoon in Scotland?" Shelby nestled into his throat. "Yes." She tilted her head back. "In the meantime," she said slowly as her hands wandered down to his waist. "I've been wanting to tell you that there's one of your domestic policies I'm fully in favor or,Senator." "Really?" His mouth lowered to hover just above hers. "You have-" she nipped at his bottom lip "-my full support.I wonder if you could just...run through the prodecure for me one more time." Alan slid a hand down her side. "It's my civic duty to make myself avaiable to all my constituents." Shelby's fingers ran up his chest to stop his jaw just before he captured her lips. "As long as it's only me, Senator." She hooked her arm around his neck. "This is the one-man one-vote system.

I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade. Weeknights, it’s often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also borrowed a couple of minor mass-production techniques from the food industry: I figured that if I was going to chop onions for a mirepoix or soffritto, why not chop enough for two or three dishes? That way, I’d only have to wash the pans, knives, and cutting boards once. Making pot dishes in this way has proved to be the single most practical and sustainable skill—both in terms of money and time spent to eat well—I acquired in my cooking education.

Once Hopkins showed that this worked in creating one atomic network, the effort could be repeated in building the second, third, and so on: We proved out this plan in several cities of moderate size. Then we undertook New York City. There the market was dominated by a rival brand. Van Camp had slight distribution. In three weeks we secured, largely by letter, 97 per cent distribution. Every grocer saw the necessity of being prepared for that coupon demand. Then one Sunday in a page ad, we inserted the coupon. This just in Greater New York. As a result of that ad, 1,460,000 coupons were presented. We paid $146,000 to the grocers to redeem them. But 1,460,000 homes were trying Van Camp’s Milk after reading our story, and all in a single day. The total cost of that enterprise, including the advertising, was $175,000, mostly spent in redeeming those coupons. In less than nine months that cost came back with a profit. We captured the New York market.

This, to me, is the point of the confession and absolution in the liturgy. When I first experienced it—the part where everyone in church stands up and says what bad people they are, and the pastor, from the distance of the chancel and the purity of her white robe says, “God forgives you”—I thought it was hogwash. Why should I care if someone says to me that some God I may or may not really believe in has erased the check marks against me for things I may or may not even think are so-called sins? This obviously is the problem with religion for so many: It makes you feel bad enough that you will need the religion to help you feel good again. But eventually the confession and absolution liturgy came to mean everything to me. It gradually began to feel like a moment when truth was spoken, perhaps for the only time all week, and it would crush me and then put me back together. One Sunday in 2006, after the last night I spent at Candace’s house, I stood in the blue-carpeted sanctuary at my husband’s church and for the first time I really paid attention to the confession. We have sinned by what we have done and by what we have left

To understand President Obama’s second term, however, all you need to know are the following three: First, the Country Clubbers. Guardians of the GOP’s upper-crust traditions, they believed in lower taxes, less regulation, and being polite. They were led in Congress by Speaker John Boehner. They held out hope for the resurrection of Mitt Romney. Their fortunes were not on the rise. Second, the Flat Earth Society, with Sarah Palin as its patron saint. These were the hard-core conspiracy theorists. They insisted that President Obama had faked his long-form birth certificate. They were certain that bike-share programs were a world-domination plot fostered by the UN. Finally, the Holy Warriors. Some of these crusaders were, in fact, religious. Others were more likely to quote The Lord of the Rings than Matthew or Luke. But regardless of where they spent their Sundays, what they shared was a worldview. Where traditional Republicans saw a debate between liberal and conservative, Holy Warriors saw an existential battle between good and evil. They warned endlessly of appeasement. They spoke of “defeating the Left” as though Satan’s minions were amassed along the Pacific coast. The Holy Warriors pursued Romneyite goals with Palinite fervor. For this reason, they were ascendant in 2013.

These days, the Lowe brothers knew better than to tempt the town’s wrath, but that didn’t stop them from sneaking over the fence in the throes of night, relishing the taste of some reckless thrill. “Do you hear that?” The older one, Hendry Lowe, stood up, brushed the forest floor off his gray T-shirt, and cracked each of his knuckles, one by one. “That’s the sound of rules breaking.” Hendry Lowe was too pretty to worry about rules. His nose was freckled from afternoons napping in sunshine. His dark curls kissed his ears and cheekbones, overgrown from months between haircuts. His clothes smelled sweet from morning pastries often stuffed in his pockets. Hendry Lowe was also too charming to play a villain. The younger brother, Alistair, leapt from the fence and crashed gracelessly to the ground. He didn’t like forgoing the use of magick, because without it he was never very good at anything—even an action as simple as landing. But tonight he had no magick to waste. “Do you hear that?” Alistair echoed, smirking as he rose to his feet. “That’s the sound of bones breaking.” Although the two brothers looked alike, Alistair wore the Lowe features far differently than Hendry. Pale skin from a lifetime spent indoors, eyes the color of cigarette ashes, a widow’s peak as sharp as a blade. He wore a wool sweater in September because he was perpetually cold. He carried the Sunday crossword in his pocket because he was perpetually bored. He was one year younger than Hendry, a good deal more powerful, and a great deal more wicked. Alistair Lowe played the perfect villain. Not because he was instinctively cruel or openly proud, but because, sometimes, he liked to.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

So, what did you want to watch?’ ‘Thought we might play a game instead,’ he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. ‘Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won’t froth like that.’ Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she’d got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. ‘The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I’ll totally kick your arse.’ Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘You’re gonna kick my arse?’ ‘Until it’s black and blue and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ That sounded very arrogant. ‘Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.’ ‘Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it’s logic and tactics,’ Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake. For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get Max back for that snide little speech, but he just licked the back of the spoon thoughtfully. ‘This is surprisingly more-ish, do you want some?’ ‘I think I’ll pass.’ ‘Well, you’re not getting out of Scrabble that easily.’ Max leaned back against the cushions, the mug cradled to his chest, and propped his feet up on the table so he could poke the Scrabble box nearer to Neve. ‘Come on, set ’em up. Unless you’re too scared.’ ‘Max, I have all the two-letter words memorised, and as for Carol Vorderman – well, she might be good at maths but there was a reason why she wasn’t in Dictionary Corner on Countdown so I’m not surprised you beat her at Scrabble.’ ‘Fighting talk.’ Max rapped his knuckles gently against Neve’s head, which made her furious. ‘I’ll remind you of that little speech once I’m done making you eat every single one of those high-scoring words you seem to think you’re so good at.’ ‘Right, that does it.’ Neve snatched up the box and practically tore off the lid, so she could bang the board down on the coffee table. ‘You can’t be that good at Scrabble if you keep your letters in a crumpled paper bag,’ Max noted, actually daring to nudge her arm with his foot. Neve knew he was only doing it to get a rise out of her, but God, it was working. ‘Game on, Pancake Boy,’ she snarled, throwing a letter rack at Max, which just made him laugh. ‘And don’t think I’m going to let you win just because it’s your birthday.’ It was the most fun Neve had ever had playing Scrabble. It might even have been the most fun she had ever had. For every obscure word she tried to play in the highest scoring place, Max would put down three tiles to make three different words and block off huge sections of the board. Every time she tried to flounce or throw a strop because ‘you’re going against the whole spirit of the game’, Max would pop another Quality Street into her mouth because, as he said, ‘It is Treat Sunday and you only had one roast potato.’ When there were no more Quality Street left and they’d drunk all the champagne, he stopped each one of her snits with a slow, devastating kiss so there were long pauses between each round. It was a point of honour to Neve that she won in the most satisfying way possible; finally getting to use her ‘q’ on a triple word score by turning Max’s ‘hogs’ into ‘quahogs’ and waving the Oxford English Dictionary in his face when he dared to challenge her.

After that, things happened very quickly. She gave me a key to her house, and I gave her a key to my apartment. If we were in town, we spent every weekend together. She cooked for me—she was good in the kitchen, but then she was good everywhere. We watched the Friday night fights on TV, and on Saturday or Sunday afternoons we'd go for long walks in the mountains above Malibu. Occasionally we would go to a movie, slipping in after the lights went down. Whenever we went out, Barbara [Stanwyck] would wear a scarf over her head, or a kind of hat, so it would be hard to tell who she was. For the next four years, we became part of each other's lives. In a very real way, I think we still are. Barbara proved to be one of the most marvelous relationships of my life. I was twenty-two, she was forty-five, but our ages were beside the point. She was everything to me—a beautiful woman with a great sense of humor and enormous accomplishments to her name.

attenuate the city’s hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs. Land, who had been one of my favorite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired NASA mathematician, still lived on her own well into her nineties and never missed a Sunday at church. We said our good-byes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. “A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.” The

You are what you are today because of how you have spent your time

You are product of how you have spent your time

We are product of time spent

The reason why you still doubt yourself today is because you haven’t spent enough time with yourself

Gravy is what Italian-Americans call tomato sauce, the three-hour kind with enough meat to feed a small country. My mother makes a huge pot of it every Sunday. It isn't so much about cooking as it is about connecting with her heritage. She likes knowing that generations of her maternal ancestors spent their Sunday mornings stirring what they called 'ragu' in their own kitchens. Even when we ate Sunday dinners at Nonna's, my mother made her own gravy before we went. She'd give half the pot to me to bring to the city, and before the end of the week we had each used up our share for lasagne, sausage-and-pepper sandwiches, baked stuffed peppers, and veal parmigiana.

Time is a wealth that once spent cannot be regained

The survey of the time spent in the home by most housewives established that, on average, they worked 75 hours a week, with overtime on Saturdays and Sundays. This did not take into account that a number of women were also doing part or full-time work outside the home.

Monday. Cassandra Jones ignored the butterflies in her stomach as she entered her fifth-grade classroom. The weekend had been rather emotional. For the first time since moving to Arkansas, she’d spent the night at a friend Riley Isabel’s house. By the time she went home, she and Riley were no longer friends, all because of a stupid fight over a dog. Her Sunday School teacher had encouraged Cassie to forgive and forget. Cassie waited in the bathroom during break and cornered Riley as soon as she came out of the stall. Riley hesitated, something like fear flashing across her face before her green eyes hardened. “What do you want?” She lifted her chin, the short strawberry-blond hair just grazing her neck. “I wanted to apologize,

I spent most of Sunday hiding, pretending I had food poisoning to keep Agnes from grilling me on what I was doing on Peter’s lap. If it was just as simple as saying, “Well, sis, I was dry humping the shit out of him, and it was awesome, thanks for asking.

My bedroom looked very different the morning of my eighteenth birthday. It looked lonely. I opened my eyes just as the sun started creeping through the window, and I stared at the white chest of drawers that had greeted me every morning since I could remember. Maybe it’s stupid to think that a piece of furniture had feelings, but then again, I’m the same girl who kept my tattered old baby doll dressed in a sweater and knitted cap so she wouldn’t get cold sitting on the top shelf of my closet. And this morning that chest of drawers was looking sad. All the photographs and trophies and silly knickknacks that had blanketed the top and told my life story better than any words ever could were gone, packed in brown cardboard boxes and neatly stacked in the cellar. Even my pretty pink walls were bare. Mama picked that color after I was born, and I’ve never wanted to change it. Ruthis Morgan used to try to convince me that my walls should be painted some other color. ‘Pink’s just not your color, Catherine Grace. You know as well as I do that there’s not a speck of pink on the football field.’ There was nothing she could say that was going to change my mind of the color on my walls. If I had I would have lost another piece of my mama. And I wasn’t letting go of any piece of her, pink or not. Daddy insisted on replacing my tired, worn curtains a while back, but I threw such a fit that he spent a good seven weeks looking for the very same fabric, little bitsy pink flowers on a white -and-pink-checkered background. He finally found a few yards in some textile mill down in South Carolina. I told him there were a few things in life that should never be allowed to change, and my curtains were one of them. So many other things were never going to stay the same, and this morning was one of them. I’d been praying for this day for as long as I could remember, and now that it was here, all I wanted to do was crawl under my covers and pretend it was any other day. . . . I know that this would be the last morning I would wake up in this bed as a Sunday-school-going, dishwashing, tomato-watering member of this family. I knew this would be the last morning I would wake up in the same bed where I had calculated God only knows how many algebra problems, the same bed I had hid under playing hide-and-seek with Martha Ann, and the same bed I had lain on and cried myself to sleep too many nights after Mama died. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day considering I was having such a hard time just saying good-bye to my bed.

wanted to, like now. “You’re good on the guitar. Really good. That’s all! I know you will do great!” “Ugh!” Josh dropped down on the couch and threw his head back. Dad stared, bewilderment painted on his face. “What? I don’t see what the big deal is.” Really, Dad? Why couldn’t he see this was the worst thing that could happen? All the guys his age would think he was above them. And he’d never get any friends! Mom sighed and leaned against the door jamb. Josh ran both hands through his hair. Thinking. Of course? Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner. “Who’s playing drums? The old guy, or Trevor?” Dad shrugged. “Uh, well I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure I could I have the young kid your age play Sunday, if you want me to.” Dad looked at Mom, then back at him. “Would that help?” Josh crossed his hands on top of his head. Thinking. Hard. “I am ‘the boss,’ you know. Right? I can pull some strings if you want me to.” Josh thought hard for another brief moment. Coming to a decision, he blurted, “Yah. Okay. I think that will work.” Dad’s face lit up. He looked over at Mom and smiled. “Okay. Let me see what I can do.” Yes, this would work. “Yeah, Dad. If Trevor plays, I’ll play!” Mom laughed. “Who’s the boss now?” The following Sunday morning, Josh spent thirty minutes straight in front of the mirror, tweaking strands of hair. He slammed the hairbrush down and growled, “Ugh! What is wrong with my stupid hair?” He would never be able to get it to look like Trevor’s—always styled with just the right amount of hair product

We didn’t believe when we first heard because you know how church folk can gossip. Like the time we all thought First John, our head usher, was messing around on his wife because Betty, the pastor’s secretary, caught him cozying up at brunch with another woman. A young, fashionable woman at that, one who switched her hips when she walked even though she had no business switching anything in front of a man married forty years. You could forgive a man for stepping out on his wife once, but to romance that young woman over buttered croissants at a sidewalk café? Now, that was a whole other thing. But before we could correct First John, he showed up at Upper Room Chapel that Sunday with his wife and the young, hip-switching woman—a great-niece visiting from Fort Worth—and that was that. When we first heard, we thought it might be that type of secret, although, we have to admit, it had felt different. Tasted different too. All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn’t. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor’s son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it. She was seventeen then. She lived with her father, a Marine, and without her mother, who had killed herself six months earlier. Since then, the girl had earned a wild reputation—she was young and scared and trying to hide her scared in her prettiness. And she was pretty, beautiful even, with amber skin, silky long hair, and eyes swirled brown and gray and gold. Like most girls, she’d already learned that pretty exposes you and pretty hides you and like most girls, she hadn’t yet learned how to navigate the difference. So we heard all about her sojourns across the border to dance clubs in Tijuana, the water bottle she carried around Oceanside High filled with vodka, the Saturdays she spent on base playing pool with Marines, nights that ended with her heels pressed against some man’s foggy window. Just tales, maybe, except for one we now know is true: she spent her senior year of high school rolling around in bed with Luke Sheppard and come springtime, his baby was growing inside her. — LUKE SHEPPARD WAITED TABLES at Fat Charlie’s Seafood Shack, a restaurant off the pier known for its fresh food, live music, and family-friendly atmosphere. At least that’s what the ad in the San Diego Union-Tribune said, if you were fool enough to believe it. If you’d been around Oceanside long enough, you’d know that the promised fresh food was day-old fish and chips stewing under heat lamps, and the live music, when delivered, usually consisted of ragtag teenagers in ripped jeans with safety pins poking through their lips.

The six lugubrious airs that he knew, always carried him back to the time when he was a car-boy at the Big Dipper Mine in Placer County, ten years before. He remembered the years he had spent there trundling the heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For thirteen days of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.

I took a shower, threw my covers back, and slipped into bed wearing nothing but Jamie’s T-shirt. I clutched the note to my chest as I pressed the button to listen to my nightly message. I went sailing today with Chelsea, he said. I thought about your hair whipping across your face, your pink cheeks, and the huge smile you had on your face as we sailed across the bay. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you. I can’t get you out of my mind. I’m always thinking about you. Me too. I pressed END and reached down beside the bed to where I had set the note. When I read it again, this time I cried. Katy, my angel, I had to go to Portland. My father had a heart attack and they don’t know if he’s going to make it through the night. Please don’t leave. If I can’t get back by tomorrow, I’ll send a car and get you a flight up here. Please, please don’t leave. I have something really important to tell you besides the fact that I am completely in love with you. —J In the morning, the note was crumpled up on my chest. I got up and spread it out on the counter. I underlined the last line and then wrote WHY? underneath it. I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed to it the R. J. Lawson Winery. I laughed to myself as I wrote Attn: The Owner. I spent Sunday in my apartment, not moping. I did a yoga video, edited some of Beth’s latest article, and then devoted the afternoon and evening to a marathon of MythBusters, during which I learned that Jack’s death in Titanic was totally unnecessary. Had that selfish bitch, Rose, given up her life jacket to tie under that wooden door, it would have been buoyant enough to hold them both. Damn her. I slid into bed at seven and listened to Jamie’s latest voice mail over and over.

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend’s Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

All of our savings were consumed in the effort to bring my dog over. Steve loved Sui so much that he understood completely why it was worth it to me. The process took forever, and I spent my days tangled in red tape. I despaired. I loved my life and I loved the zoo, but there were times during that desperate first winter when it seemed we were fighting a losing battle. Then our documentaries started to air on Australian television. The first one, on the Cattle Creek croc rescue, caused a minor stir. There was more interest in the zoo, and more excitement about Steve as a personality. We hurried to do more films with John Stainton. As those hit the airwaves, it felt like a slow-motion thunderclap. Croc Hunter fever began to take hold. The shows did well in Sydney, even better in Melbourne, and absolutely fabulous in Brisbane, where they beat out a long-running number one show, the first program to do so. I believe we struck a chord among Australians because Steve wasn’t a manufactured TV personality. He actually did head out into the bush to catch crocodiles. He ran a zoo. He wore khakis. Among all the people of the world, Australians have a fine sense of the genuine. Steve was the real deal. Although the first documentary was popular and we were continuing to film more, it would be years before we would see any financial gain from our film work. But Steve sat down with me one evening to talk about what we would do if all our grand plans ever came to fruition. “When we start to make a quid out of Crocodile Hunter,” he said, “we need to have a plan.” That evening, we made an agreement that would form the foundation of our marriage in regard to our working life together. Any money we made out of Crocodile Hunter--whether it was through documentaries, toys, or T-shirts (we barely dared to imagine that our future would hold spin-offs such as books and movies)--would go right back into conservation. We would earn a wage from working at the zoo like everybody else. But everything we earned outside of it would go toward helping wildlife, 100 percent. That was our deal. As a result of the documentaries, our zoo business turned from a trickle to a steady stream. Only months earlier, a big day to us might have been $650 in total receipts. When we did $3,500 worth of business one Sunday, and then the next Sunday upped that record to bring in $4,500, we knew our little business was taking off. Things were going so well that it was a total shock when I received a stern notice from the Australian immigration authorities. Suddenly it appeared that not only was it going to be a challenge to bring Shasta and Malina to my new home of Australia, I was encountering problems with my own immigration too. Just when Steve and I had made our first tentative steps to build a wonderful life together, it looked as though it could all come tumbling down.

At the hospital, an attendant brought down a wheelchair for me. Steve somehow managed, without a forklift, to get me out of the truck and into the wheelchair. The birth progressed a lot faster than it had with Bindi. I wasn’t worried because I had Steve with me, and I knew everything would be fine, as long as we were together. I pushed like an Olympic baby pusher. I should have gotten the gold for my pushing. I think I pushed until I was nearly inside out. The baby came. Steve said, “It’s a boy!” and brought him to me. I remember my son’s tiny pink mouth. He looked like a baby bird with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He immediately began feeding. Steve cried tears of joy. Once we got settled, the proud papa headed for Sunshine Coast Grammar School to tell Bindi the news. “You’ve got a little brother,” he told her. Bindi was elated, in spite of the fact that she had spent every night saying her prayers for a little sister. Steve brought her to the hospital, where she took her little brother in her arms and looked at him lovingly. “How do you know he’s a boy?” she asked. “Bindi,” Thelma said, “they’re not born with clothes on.” “I think I will name him Brian,” Bindi said. “His name is Robert,” Steve told her. “Oh, well,” Bindi said. “I’m going to call him Brian for short.” It was a Sunday, December 1, 2003, and we had all just received the best Christmas present ever. Robert Clarence Irwin. Baby Bob.

The value of a substance is the product of the time spent to achieve it

Time spent adding value is not wasted

Occupy the earth with the multiplication of yourself

Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church, on a hill between Waterloo and Cedar Falls, took their place in the pews, and listened to the minister. But there seemed to be no fire or passion, no sense of what was really happening in the world. They’d tried other churches and found congregations interested in what God had done 2,000 years ago, but no one paying attention to what God was doing right then. Certainly, churches weren’t addressing the crime in Cedar Falls, the drugs, or the sorry state of schools and government, not to mention the kind of danger that Hal Lindsey described. They would have to find the truth themselves. They began doing their own research, especially Vicki. She had quit work to raise Sara, and later Samuel, who was born in April 1978. When Sara started school, Randy and Vicki couldn’t believe the pagan things she was being taught. They refused to allow her to dress up for Halloween—Satan’s holiday—and decided they had to teach Sara at home. But that was illegal in Iowa. A booster shot of religion came with cable television and The PTL Club, the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell. The small television in the kitchen was on all the time for a while, but most of Vicki’s free time was spent reading. She’s lose herself in the Cedar Falls public library, reading the science fiction her dad had introduced her to as a kid, the novels and self-help books friends recommended, biblical histories, political tracts, and obscure books that she discovered on her own. Like a painter, she pulled out colors and hues that fit with the philosophy she and Randy were discovering, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be something guiding them toward “the truth,” and, at the same time, pulling them closer together. She spent hours in the library, and when she found something that fit, she passed it along first to Randy, who might read the book himself and then spread it to everyone—the people at work, in the neighborhood, at the coffee shop where he hung out. They read books from fringe organizations and groups, picking through the philosophies, taking what they agreed with and discarding the rest. Yet some of the books that influenced them came from the mainstream, such as Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Vicki found its struggle between the individual and the state prophetic and its action inspiring. The book shows a government so overbearing and immoral that creative people, led by a self-reliant protagonist, go on strike and move to the mountains. “‘You will win,’” the book’s protagonist cries from his mountain hideout, “‘when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.

Everything good you see is a product of time well spent