With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

Life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed.

He defined himself almost wholly in the negative: It was not who he was, it was who he was not.

Now it is you who everyone presumes is so fragile. Wounded. Scarred. Maybe they're right. Perhaps you are. A nursery rhyme comes into your head, and, like an egg, you allow yourself to topple onto your side, your legs still pulled hard against your torso. You lie like that a long while, watching the chrome shell of the tape measure sparkle until the sun moves.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.