it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.