Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic...but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

The Giants are usually described as rag tag, kind of a great garage sale team, and the Democrats are described as the Mommies to the Republican Daddies; and everyone hates the mommies, but wait, wait - I didn't intend to get into the pathos and thrill of being a Democratic Giants fan.

I do not have deep theological understanding or opinion, but I do not read the Bible as the literal word of God.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.