A pause while my mother made high-pitched sisterly devotions of gratitude.

Top Trumps appeared to be a game in which you got cards, and the cards had a picture (in this case, of a horse), and told you all kinds of stats for that horse, how fast it was, how big it was, etc. Whoever had the better horse won both the cards. You repeated this until someone had all the cards. So, basically it was exactly like high school, except it only took three minutes. Which was really a bit more humane, if you thought about it.

One of them hung a pink bra from our lighting fixture. I left it there. It was a nice bra

She didn't even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that--impossible as it seemed--it was a fox.

She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H. Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All

She introduced herself to my parents with one of her mighty, bunny-crushing handshakes. (I'd never seen Claudia crush a bunny, to be fair, but that's the approximate level of pressure.)

People always say they can't do things, that they're impossible. They just haven't been creative enough.