She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.

Who is more amateurish, more vulnerable---those who rely on machines that need to be plugged in, or logged on, or in some other way connected in order to be more than a useless slab of plastic ... or those who have learned to master life without?

But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?...principessa?" I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

...had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples.

Only weak men want women to be weak.