It's hard / Keeping up with the avant-garde.

O, merry is the Optimist, With the troops of courage leaguing. But a dour trend In any friend Is somehow less fatiguing.

Meek-eyed parents hasten down the ramps To greet their offspring, terrible from camps.

Scratch any father, you find / Someone chock-full of qualms and romantic terrors, / Believing change is a threat.

Sons do not need you. They are always out of your reach, Walking strange waters.

Of course we women gossip on occasion. But our appetite for it is not as avid as a man s. It is in the boys gyms, the college fraternity houses, the club locker rooms, the paneled offices of business that gossip reaches its luxuriant flower.

Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.