The Beginning And The End Are Never

Your Kids Are Launched. You Love Your Work But You Understand How To Place It In The Panorama Of The Rest Of Your Life. There's This Line In The Book, And When I Wrote It I Thought Yes, That's It - If You Think Of Life As A Job, Maybe By The Time You Get To, Say, In My Case, 60, You've Finally Gotten Good At It.

More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

All Of Life Like A Series Of Tableaux, And In The Living We Missed So Much, Hid So Much, Left So Much Undone And Unsaid.

Well, We Tell Our Kids Things Like 'don't Gossip' And Then An Hour Later They Hear Us On The Phone. Stuff Like That.

The Great Motherhood Friendships Are The Ones In Which Two Women Can Admit [how Difficult Mothering Is] Quietly To Each Other, Over Cups Of Tea At A Table Sticky With Spilled Apple Juice And Littered With Markers Without Tops.