Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

Forty isn’t too old to have a child. Fifty is too old to have a ten-year-old child.”

There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ and ‘on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.