In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after