The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

What I think," Chatty says, "is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.

When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way they flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn't a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction - dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there's not an end to it.