In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

What does it cost to lose those weeks, that light, the very nights in the year preferred over all others? Can you evade the dying of the brightness? Or do you evade only its warning? Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?