I Meet A Person, And

I Know When A Story Is Finished When There Is Not A Single Thing More I Can Think To Do To It. And Since I Know At The Start What The Last Line Will Be, I Know When I've Reached That Point As Logically As I Can That It's Finished. As For The Rewriting-it's Not Foolproof, Of Course, But If You're Honest About Having Thought Of Every Possibility And You Still Come Back To What You Have, What More Can You Do?

Maybe This Is Not A Come-down-from-the-ledge Story. But I Tell It With The Thought That The Woman On The Ledge Will Ask Herself A Question, The Question That Occurred To That Man In Bogota. He Wondered How We Know That What Happens To Us Isn't Good?

When My Mother Died, My Father's Early Widowhood Gave Him Social Cachet He Would Not Have Had If They Had Divorced. He Was A Bigger Catch For The Sorrow Attached.

I Had A Mother I Could Only Seem To Please With Verbal Accomplishments Of Some Sort Or Another. She Read Constantly, So I Read Constantly. If I Used Words That Might Have Seemed Surprising At A Young Age, She Would Recognize That And It Would Please Her.

As Soon As I Knew That I Would Be All Right, I Was Sure That I Was Dead And Didn't Know It. I Moved Through The Days Like A Severed Head That Finishes A Sentence. I Waited For The Moment That Would Snap Me Out Of My Seeming Life.