The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before

She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember.

One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.