I Get About Five Memoirs

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.

I Don't Have A Copy Of My Books, And The Degree To Which I Never Read Them Is Profound. I Never Look.

Those Are Only Rumors Of Suffering. Real Suffering Has A Face And A Smell. It Lasts In The Most Intense Form No Matter What You Drape Over It. And It Knows Your Name.

Having A Great Dad Probably Permitted Me To Pal Around With Guys In A Way That Some Women Don't.

The Lesson You've Got To Learn Is The Someday You'll Someday Stagger To, Blinking In Cold Light, All Tears Shed, Ready To Poke Your Bovine Head In The Yoke They've Shaped. Everyone Learns This. Born, Everyone Breathes, Pays Tax, Plants Dead And Hurts Galore. There's Grief Enough For Each. My Mother Learned By Moving Man To Man, Outlived Them All. The Parched Earth's Bare (once She Leaves It) Of Any Who Watched The Instants I Trod It. Other Than Myself, Of Course. I've Made A Study Of Bearing And Forbearance. Everyone Does, It Turns Out, And Note Those Faces Passing By: Not One's A God.