A Spool of Blue Thread

by Anne Tyler

Why was he always so eager to exchange his family for someone else’s?

But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. “It’s him!” you say. “He came! We knew he would; we always …” But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and

your heart breaks.

This phrase belongs at the end of the previous highlight. Sorry.

The disappointments seemed to escape the family’s notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

“It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon …”

“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?

‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’

Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House?

“Now, how to amuse them today?” Red

makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”