I Have The Most Charmed,

The City Was Bigger Than Its Buildings, Bigger Than Its Inhabitants Too. It Had Its Own Nuances. It Accepted Whatever Came Its Way, The Crime And The Violence And The Little Shocks Of Good That Crawled Out From Underneath The Everyday.

It Is Not Fashionable Anymore, I Suppose, To Have A Regard For One's Mother In The Way My Brother And I Had Then, In The Mid-1950s, When The Noise Outside The Window Was Mostly Wind And Sea Chime.

Long Ago, Long Ago. The Simple Things Come Back To Us. They Rest For A Moment By Our Ribcages Then Suddenly Reach In And Twist Our Hearts A Notch Backward.

That's What Sons Do: Write To Their Mothers About Recall, Tell Themselves About The Past Until They Come To Realize That They Are The Past.

Sometimes We Just Walk Into Something That Is Not For Us At All. We Pretend It Is. We Think We Can Shrug It Off Like A Coat, But It's Not A Coat At All, It's More Like Another Skin. [...] All I Wanted Was To Make My Life Thrilling For A While: To Take The Oridinary Objects Of My Days And Make A Different Argument Out Of Them, No Obligations To My Past.