The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

Every letter was a love letter.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant