Five Tuesdays in Winter

My 4 highlights

• Steve answered. We didn’t have caller ID then, so phone calls were still a mystery. Steve started flapping his arm immediately, waving me up off the couch with huge sweeps while carrying on in a flat, placid voice, saying,

• He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.

• The parents looked like tired zookeepers, not angry, just overwhelmed by the physical demands.

• His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.