The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage... Your values must be alike. And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?" Yes? "Your belief in the importance of your marriage.

I always look for a "rhythm" in my writing. A cadence to the sentences. Sometimes I think of pieces I write in a song writing infrastructure - i.e., a verse, a chorus that I return to, a bridge that's something differenct, a chorus that I return to.

Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.

You have to start over. That's what they say. But life is not a board game, and losing a loved one is never really "starting over." More like "continuing without.

Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?

I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make - pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad - but it carries a certain taste of memory.