We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.

Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.