Hatred Is Always A Sin, My Mother

I Just Believed It Easily, The Way You Might Believe And In Fact Remember That You Once Had Another Set Of Teeth, Now Vanished But Real In Spite Of That. Until One Day, One Day When I May Even Have Been In My Teens, I Knew With A Dim Sort Of Hole In My Insides That Now I Didn't Believe It Anymore.

She Could Not Explain Or Quite Understand That It Wasn't Altogether Jealousy She Felt, It Was Rage. And Not Because She Couldn't Shop Like That Or Dress Like That. It Was Because That Was What Girls Were Supposed To Be Like. That Was What Men - People, Everybody - Thought They Should Be Like. Beautiful, Treasured, Spoiled, Selfish, Pea-brained. That Was What A Girl Should Be, To Be Fallen In Love With. Then She Would Become A Mother And She'd Be All Mushily Devoted To Her Babies. Not Selfish Anymore, But Just As Pea-brained. Forever.

Moments Of Kindness And Reconciliation Are Worth Having, Even If The Parting Has To Come Sooner Or Later.

Peoples Lives, In Jubilee As Elsewhere, Were Dull, Simple, Amazing, Unfathomable-deep Caves Paved With Kitchen Linoleum. . . . What I Wanted [to Write Down] Was Every Last Thing, Every Layer Of Speech And Thought, Stroke Of Light On Bark Or Walls, Every Smell, Pothole, Pain, Crack, Delusion, Held Still And Held Together-radiant, Everlasting.

Few People, Very Few, Have A Treasure, And If You Do You Must Hang Onto It. You Must Not Let Yourself Be Waylaid, And Have It Taken From You.