The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.