Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

What I know is, you have chance in life--of surviving it--if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

I get very involved in the internal logic of sentences.