Will Lexington Quotes

...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there

Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.

The city most believed to be the handsomest in Kentucky never failed to impress .... The streets, lined with booths and wagons from which people displayed their wares, had a festive air.

On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it. So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.

How most people carry on is a mystery. What they talk about at supper. How they can stand to sit in front of a TV from eight until Leno every night. How they can think bowling is fun. How they choose their neckties. How they bear the weight of everyday life without screaming. How a person can go through a whole life and never once contemplate suicide, like people who have never once wanted to be a movie star. How one young man can be handsome and strong and marry and heiress and work at Debevoise and Plimpton and retire to Nantucket to await the visits of his grandchildren, how they can be sailing in the bay while another young man, exactly like the first, can end up in a glass room in Lexington, Kentucky, on Haldol and Thorazine, without hope, without a girlfriend, without a future, and how easily the one can become the other. How one woman can take Gatorade to every one of her son's lacrosse games and another can lie in bed all day weeping, popping generic drugs, watching Oprah as though waiting for the Second Coming, and piling her dirty dishes in the laundry room. How life goes in bad directions when your heart is asleep. It's a mystery and there is no answer. (95)

The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.

A French writer once observed that, "in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.

Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

London—the king’s men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.

By ten o'clock, the sidewalk along Vine Street looks like the Fourth of July parade. Mama minds the cash box while Daddy and Mitch go to haul more tomatoes and peppers from the truck. The basket of beans is almost empty, so I fill it up again.

Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).

When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.

Lexington is not big enough to have clubs with long lines, but at least they don't have velvet ropes.

The captive had broken off the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a stone, wherein he had scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious drop that fell once in every three minutes with the dreary regularity of a clock- tick--a dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror created the British empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at Lexington was "news." It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect's need?

In New York the Fifth Avenue Lingerie Shop is on Madison Avenue, the Madison Pet Shop is on Lexington Avenue, the Park Avenue Florist is on Madison Avenue, and the Lexington Hand Laundry is on Third Avenue. New York is the home of 120 pawnbrokers, and it is where Bishop Sheen's brother, Dr. Sheen, shares an office with one Dr. Bishop.

the hardest of war’s hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering those men to their deaths.

Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned.

Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

Edmund S. Morgan would write (in respect to the Declaration of Independence), "The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.… The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.… Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.

Ohhhhh." A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed. She's not thinking such a thought! Not her. She's an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She's never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She's never had a melancholy thought. She's never had a savage thought. She's never had a desperate thought. She's never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she's a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She's laughing and squealing like a four year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer's strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl's face. Shivering in New York City mid-summer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover's quickened breath. "Oh! Ohhhhh." It's nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the heat of midday. The goddess of love has been standing like this, legs apart, in spike-heeled white sandals so steep and so tight they've permanently disfigured her smallest toes, for hours. She's been squealing and laughing, her mouth aches. There's a gathering pool of darkness at the back of her head like tarry water. Her scalp and her pubis burn from the morning's peroxide applications. The Girl with No Name. The glaring-white lights focus upon her, upon her alone, blond squealing, blond laughter, blond Venus, blond insomnia, blond smooth-shaven legs apart and blond hands fluttering in a futile effort to keep her skirt from lifting to reveal white cotton American-girl panties and the shadow, just the shadow, of the bleached crotch. "Ohhhhhh." Now she's hugging herself beneath her big bountiful breasts. Her eyelids fluttering. Between the legs, you can trust she's clean. She's not a dirty girl, nothing foreign or exotic. She's an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She's been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory. She has not lived long and she will not live long.

Lexington, Kentucky looks like paradise. Acres of grass as green and tender as a golf course putting green surround hilltop mansions. New Circle Road--a beltway enveloping the city's heartland like a moat--attempts to separate the wealthy landowners from the encroaching strip centers and fast-food joins that are symbolic of the rest of the state .... Combining the traditional feelings of Southerners with the uniquely gorgeous landscape of the bluegrass, Lexingtonians consider themselves and their region the cream of the crop--not only of Kentucky, but also of the nation.

as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come.

Thomas Paine, who had a shrewd eye for military matters, was closer to the mark in a public letter to Admiral Howe published in early 1777. “In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with,” Paine observed. “In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.

The point is,” he continued a little roughly, “I learned early on that we create our own narrative. It doesn’t matter what other people say about us as long as we know who and what we are. And here’s the other thing people don’t want you to know: you don’t have to be the same thing all the time. You can wear scuffed work boots one day, a bow tie the next.

Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.

Lexington.

You may call him just what you like, but the world will hear of him as Lexington.

Actually, Mr. Jack is not about anger, it’s about how, perhaps the most heinous of crimes is to deny ourselves and live vicariously through others.

Franklin concurred with Samuel Johnson that ship travel was like being in jail without the comforts of jail.

Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly

Clinton’s version went on for eight pages in his tidy, nearly indecipherable hand, the runic words canting to the right as if into a headwind.

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street.

Tis worth the experiment. Audaces fortuna juvat”—fortune favors the bold—though he tempted fortune by adding, “Should we fail I don’t see any fatal consequences which are likely to attend it.

On one foggy, misty night, King ordered the air groups from the Lexington and Saratoga to launch simultaneously well after sunset. The chaos was predictable but, in King’s mind, instructional.

Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.

The Americans, the Scottish economist Adam Smith warned, “feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Oh—I discovered venereal warts on my ass last week. Had them burned off by Dr. Jones, in that VD Mill he runs on Lexington Avenue; if you went to him with a broken leg, he'd tell you it was syphilis—too too depressing/cheers.

If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free. Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop.

They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in

That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.

War had come on April 19, with the first blood shed at Lexington and Concord near Boston, then savagely on June 17 at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. (The June engagement was commonly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill on both sides of the Atlantic.)

By the early summer of 1776, the town had grown to twelve thousand residents—half white and free, half neither. Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery, as plain as the blue-stained palms of the indigo pickers sold on the Custom House auction block, or the ships packed with shackled Gambians and Angolans at Fitzsimmons’ Wharf, or the pillory near So Be It Lane for “negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos, who are apt to be riotous and disorderly,” according to a town ordinance.

In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom.

Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.

British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

To the worst of them, she had been just another piece of Mr. Alexander’s choice livestock, and her pallet, in an alcove off the laundry room, had afforded her no lock or door bar. Since then, she and Jarret had managed to live in the precarious intimacy that is the only kind possible when one partner still ardently loves another. When Jarret sat by his hearth under the oil painting of Lexington, gazing at her lovely face in the firelight, he tried to forget that. As he tried to forget that it wasn’t a legal marriage and that, for all his authority at Woodburn, he was still enslaved.

Thomas Paine had failed at everything he ever attempted in Britain: shopkeeping, teaching, tax collecting (twice), and marriage (also twice). For years he made whalebone corset stays in dreary provincial towns, then worked as an exciseman, chasing Dutch gin and tobacco smugglers along the English coast before being sacked for cause. Forced into bankruptcy—“Trade I do not understand,” he admitted—in desperation he sailed for Philadelphia and immediately found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, printing articles on Voltaire, beavers, suicide, and revolutionary politics. A gifted writer, infused with egalitarian and utopian ideals, he attacked slavery, dueling, animal cruelty, and the oppression of women. On January 10, 1776, a thousand copies of his new pamphlet on the American rebellion had been published anonymously under a simple title suggested by Dr. Benjamin Rush.

As if to underscore the seriousness of her charge, Abigail, only partially in jest, went on to assert: “If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.

My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes? It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much: Careful Now in capitals. That was a different letter. Yes, but I get confused. One day she saw a golden oriel in the orchard. One day she said, Then have your orgy with Blondie, work out your passion on her. I see it all, the poop of burnished gold. If I got angry and made a scene? But No. No. No, I believe you, of course, I believe you for didn't you say I was the one? Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return. This was my dream, and why I had circles under my eyes this morning at breakfast. Everyone noticed it, and I think one of them sniggered. You don't take much interest in politics, do you? You never read the newspapers? I drank my coffee, but I had a slight feeling of nausea. It's to be expected, I don't mind it at all, it's nothing. My love, are you feeling better? He can't talk, he can only mutter. O my dear, O my dear, drink a little milk, lie down and rest a little. I will comfort you. I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it. It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on. Did I say suspicion? No. No. No. It's nothing. I love you. A slight feeling of nausea, that's all. After a while I got out into the open air, and his face was the moon hanging in the snowy branches.

Another time, as they walked down Lexington Avenue together, Trump saw a newspaper headline announcing the arrest of a New Jersey mayor for allegedly taking an $800,000 bribe from a developer. “There is no goddamn mayor in America worth $800,000,” Trump bellowed. “I can buy a U.S. senator for $200,000.

Surely slavery was not tolerated in Kentucky, surely not in Lexington, which the captain so often called the Beautiful City. Everything would be different once they arrived in paradise. There'd be neither black nor white--there'd be people. Cynthia had been neither schooled nor conditioned for prejudice.

But Bachmann’s efforts to strut her IQ were undermined by gaffes galore. In New Hampshire, she hailed the state for being “where the shot was heard round the world in Lexington and Concord.” (That blast emanated from Massachusetts.) On June 27, the day of her official announcement in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, Bachmann proclaimed in a Fox News interview that “John Wayne was from Waterloo.” (Wayne was in fact from Winterset, Iowa; serial killer John Wayne Gacy was from Waterloo.) From now on, her son Lucas razzed his mother, “you can’t say George Washington was the first president unless we Google that shit first.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

I take a deep breath and try to relax. “My Sun, Clara, get your shit together,” Paige says out of the side of her mouth. “Are you this much of a mess when he trains with you?” “Ms. Lexington, is there something you’d like to share with the class?” Mr. Mendez asks as I die from embarrassment. “No, sir,” Paige says.

Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.

Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.” In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23.

How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day. “You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain, she floundered on. “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press. “My little orphan,” Carol said. Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony’s deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

I was flying. My shoulders loosened, my stride opened, my heart banged the base of my throat. I crossed Carnegie and ran up the block waving my arms. I crossed Lexington and ran up the block waving my arms. A linen-suited woman in her fifties did meet my exultant eye. She looked exultant herself, seeing me from far up the block. Her face was thin and tanned. We converged. Her warm, intelligent glance said she knew what I was doing- not because she herself had been a child but because she herself took a few loose aerial turns around her apartment every night for the hell of it, and by day played along with the rest of the world and took the streetcar. So Teresa of Avila checked her unseemly joy and hung on to the altar rail to hold herself down. The woman's smiling, deep glance seemed to read my own awareness from my face, so we passed on the sidewalk- a beautifully upright woman walking in her tan linen suit, a kid running and flapping her arms- we passed on the sidewalk with a look of accomplices who share a humor just beyond irony. What's a heart for?

Erect and somber, Washington rode into the middle of a hollow square formed by New York and Connecticut regiments while a chirpy throng of civilians ringed the greensward. A uniformed aide spurred his horse forward; the crowd hushed as he unfolded his script and began to read: “In Congress, July 4, 1776.” Even the most unlettered private recognized that something majestic was in the air. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. “Confusion and discord reigned in every department,” Washington wrote in late July. “However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.

{The resolution of the surviving members of the Eleventh Illinois Cavalry, whom Robert Ingersoll was the commander of, at his funeral quoted here} Robert G. Ingersoll is dead. The brave soldier, the unswerving patriot, the true friend, and the distinguished colonel of the old regiment of which we have the honor to be a remanent, sleeps his last sleep. No word of ours, though written in flame, no chaplet that our hands can weave, no testimony that our personal knowledge can bring, will add anything to his fame. The world honors him as the prince of orators in his generation, as its emancipator from manacles and dogmas; philosophy, for his aid in beating back the ghosts of superstition; and we, in addition to these, for our personal knowledge of him, as a man, a soldier, and a friend. We know him as the general public did not. We knew him in the military camp, where he reigned an uncrowned king, ruling with that bright scepter of human benevolence which death alone could wrest from his hand. We had the honor to obey, as we could, his calm but resolute commands at Shiloh, at Corinth, and at Lexington, knowing as we did, that he would never command a man to go where he would not dare to lead the way. We recognize only a small circle who could know more of his manliness and worth than we do. And to such we say: Look up, if you can, through natural tears; try to be as brave as he was, and try to remember -- in the midst of grief which his greatest wish for life would have been to help you to bear -- that he had no fear of death nor of anything beyond.

In the pleasant May of 1958, a group of pioneers, engineers, second-generation Americans, speculators, ne'er-do-wells, and visionaries known as the Chocinoe Management Group gathered by a bubbling spring in the middle fork of Lansill's Creek and talked about creating a settlement to be called Garden Springs. The next month they received a use permit from the Planning Commission of the City of Lexington, and began clear-cutting and bulldozing, in preparation for the excavation of sites where the cement foundations of this subdivision would be laid .... The building of this subdivision was part of the all-important process of Lexington's becoming The Greater Lexington Area, and I take special pride in noting that this general shift away from its tobacco-town heritage was bemoaned by scarcely anyone.

LIBERTY IS EQUALLY AS PRECIOUS TO A BLACK MAN, AS IT IS TO A WHITE ONE, AND BONDAGE EQUALLY AS INTOLERABLE TO THE ONE AS IT IS TO THE OTHER . . . . AN AFRICAN, OR A NEGRO MAY JUSTLY CHALLENGE, AND HAS AN UNDENIABLE RIGHT TO HIS LIBERTY: CONSEQUENTLY, THE PRACTISE OF SLAVE-KEEPING, WHICH SO MUCH ABOUNDS IN THIS LAND IS ILLICT. —ESSAY WRITTEN BY AFRICAN AMERICAN LEMUEL HAYNES, VETERAN OF THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON E

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Lexington, Kentucky, founder of the antislavery newspaper The True American, commanded a crowd of about fifteen hundred in a grove in Springfield. Lincoln, accompanied by his friend Orville Browning, was there. “Whittling sticks, as he lay on the turf, Lincoln gave me a most patient hearing,” Clay recalled. “I shall never forget his long, ungainly form, and his ever sad and homely face.

Sei il ragazzo dell’ufficio postale? Mi sento superimbarazzato in questo momento, e non posso credere che sto facendo una cosa del genere, ma eccomi qua. Abbiamo parlato per pochi minuti all’ufficio postale sulla Lexington. Io ero il tizio con la cravatta con gli hot dog. Tu volevi spedire delle cose al tuo ex. Mi ha affascinato la tua risata. Vorrei averti chiesto il numero. Vuoi darmi una seconda possibilità, universo?

Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard .... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees .... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.

Described by his biographer as an “overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate,” he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies—than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”70 Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.

The ships themselves were extremely vulnerable, but they could inflict heavy punishment on an enemy from long range, if they could find him and strike him first. The tactical imperatives were to keep moving; to keep your scouts in the air, flying wide search patterns; and to hide your flight decks in weather fronts while pinning your enemy down in zones of clear visibility. “If they can’t find you they can’t hit you,” said Captain Sherman of the Lexington. “The carrier is a weapon that can dash in, hit hard and disappear.

Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness. Warren circled round to that very point: Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.

none surpassed this document in elegance, clarity, or breathtaking vision. That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.

He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound of ocean waves.

Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer. And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective.

As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed!

Swords were brought out, guns oiled and made ready, and everything was in a bustle when the old Lexington dropped her anchor on January 26, 1847, in Monterey Bay, after a voyage of one hundred and ninety-eight days from New York. Everything on shore looked bright and beautiful, the hills covered with grass and flowers, the live oaks so serene and homelike, and the low adobe houses, with red-tiled roofs and whitened walls, contrasted well with the dark pine trees behind, making a decidedly good impression upon us who had come so far to spy out the land. Nothing could be more peaceful in its looks than Monterey in January, 1847.

Preaching after the battles of Lexington and Concord, William Stearns had said: We trust that all whose circumstance will admit of it will go. that none such will refuse to enlist in defense of his country. When God, in His providence, calls to take the sword, if any refuse to obey, Heaven’s dread artillery is leveled against them, as you may see ... Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood! (Jeremiah 48:10). Cursed is the sneaking coward who neglects the sinking state, when called to its defense—O then flee this dire curse—let America’s valorous sons put on the harness, nor take it off till peace shall be to Israel.

Because what she dreaded now, ever since that walk down Lexington Avenue, was that the illness that had possessed, transformed, and consumed her father might also be at work in her brain. She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors- and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.

Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams. A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.

He waited a few more seconds, hoping her tight jaw would unclench and she’d ask him to stay, but she sat staring down the empty track. There was nothing for him to do but walk away. The drum of his boot heels as he left Amanda and Lydia behind sounded like the clang of the door slamming shut on his prison cell in Lexington. Each step away from them felt like a year added to his sentence. Spence only walked about a hundred yards before he stopped. His chest ached so much he could hardly draw breath. He couldn’t do this. He looked back over his shoulder at Amanda sitting on the bench. She held Lydia on her lap facing her, resting against her arms and looking up into her face. They were involved in an intimate, one-sided conversation. He stood and stared. He couldn’t leave them, but Amanda had made it clear she didn’t want him. God, he would give anything if he could go back and change the way they’d met. But how could he have done things differently and still have met Amanda? If he hadn’t pretended to be Travis Baxter that day at the station, she never would’ve spoken to him at all. Spence couldn’t regret what he’d done nor could he condone it. It was a double-edged sword.

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. . . . At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long-suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed. There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great Government--the Government of the greatest Nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ?" There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. . . . But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome." -Lyndon B. Johnson, 15 March 1965

Lexington

would lay the groundwork for “the titles and estates of our future nobility—Duke of Cincinnati! Earl of Lexington! Marquis of Nashville! Count of St. Louis! Prince of New Orleans! . . . When the renewed charter is brought in for us to vote upon, I shall consider myself as voting upon a bill for the establishment of lords and commons in this America, and for the eventual establishment of a king!

tattered

Lexington High still plays Burlington High on Thanksgiving Day, and Dratch and I trash-text each other. She calls me Burlington garbage and I tell her to go drive her Mercedes into a lake.

PEACETIME BY LUKE MOGELSON   I was living in the armory on Lexington Avenue. First Sergeant Diaz had given me the keys.

Lexington, met the man who would inspire four long years of unrequited love on her part, she was thinking about fossils. She didn’t have any

The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes

Wooten, for any reason, you would have a difficult time even bringing

We stole

February 5: Marilyn is photographed in a two-shot with Carson McCullers, kissing her at McCullers’s home in Nyack, New York, and later with McCullers and Isak Dinesen, with the threesome seated and looking over a manuscript in Dinesen’s hands. In another shot, Miller is at the table with Marilyn and McCullers. He toasts Dinesen. They dine on oysters, white grapes, champagne, and a soufflé. Marilyn attends a screening of Some Like It Hot at Loews on Lexington Avenue in New York. The capacity audience laughs with approval. Arthur Miller loves the picture, but Marilyn is upset because she looks like a “fat pig.” She is photographed in the audience putting her hands to her face.

The Lexington company were tragic victims of one of those unreal moments when two nations are moving towards war, yet neither wishes to strike the first blow, and many on both sides cannot bring themselves to believe that the blow will really be struck, that guns will go off, that men will really bleed and die.