More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He had a policy at the time never to say no to new and potentially peculiar experiences in case he needed things to write about later. Dating a doctor who liked poets because someone he’d never met before thought they’d hit it off seemed like it fell into this category.
And that’s all it was. Writing fodder. Writing fodder and a change of pace and a new life philosophy that was not to say no.
He said he wanted to be a chef when he grew up. He also said he wanted to be a cat when he grew up. When he grew up, he said, he wanted to be a chef, a cat, a vet, a dinosaur, a train, a farmer, a recorder player, a scientist, an ice-cream cone, a first baseman, or maybe the inventor of a new kind of food that tasted like chocolate ice cream but nourished like something his mother would say yes to for breakfast.
storytelling. “Where was I?” “Grumwald was using fern leaves to capture the night fairies who came to his window every night—”
Yawn
was always threatening to move to be nearer to Rosie and the boys, but Wisconsin was—obviously, nonnegotiably, self-evidently—too cold. So she stayed in Phoenix and held the weather to her heart as a talisman, clutched to her breast against all counteroffers. But she came up for the summers. Phoenix’s weather need not be clutched to the breast for June through September.
Carmelo was also the one who took Claude to buy a bathing suit as a preschool graduation present. She let him pick it out himself, which is how Rosie arrived home from work one day to find her youngest son running through the sprinkler in a pink bikini with white and yellow daisies.
The Wonks also fell into that category of people where Rosie couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t use the wife’s last name instead. Tradition is one thing, but who wanted to send her kid through life with a name like Bristol Wonks? There were so many things that befell your children you could not control. Why wouldn’t you do something about the one you could?
This from someone who named her kids Room, Orion and Rigel?
Barrie liked this
England in 1666 had war, plague, and a three-day fire that destroyed most of London, plus Isaac Newton invented calculus, thereby making the lives of mathematically ungifted students immeasurably worse forever.
Penn found it remarkable that a dozen or so years of school was sufficient to keep everyone on an academic calendar for life so that even people like Mr. Tongo, who had no children, wished him a happy new year every September. It was as if those school years bred a nostalgia so deep into the cells that the body woke to it each fall as naturally as the squirrels in the park began their frenzied harvest, never mind the weather was still fine, the sun still gracing them all.
Rosie couldn’t decide where to focus first: her daughter’s apparent interest in science, which was thrilling, her familiarity with the word “ichthyology,” which was news, her concern with the hegemony, which warranted further discussion for sure but, it being already past her bedtime, perhaps another night, or the fact that her classmates were bullying her about her career choices and who knew what else.
“Why are you calling me dude?” “That’s what guys call each other.” “It is?” “Let me in.” He did. “All guys?” “Yeah.
How’s it hangin’?” “How’s … what hanging?” “It’s an expression,” Ben explained. “It’s how guys ask each other how they are.” “Why don’t they just say ‘How are you?’” “They don’t want to get beat up.” Claude’s eyes were wide. “Guys get beat up for asking how you are?” “Guys get beat up for everything. Asking how you are. Caring how you are. Using big words. Pronouncing them correctly. Wearing colorful things.” “Really?” “Oh yeah. And that’s just the beginning. If you’re too smart, too dumb, too cool, too worried about being cool, too nicely dressed, too hiply dressed, not hiply enough dressed,
...more
“Why are you telling me this?” “I’m helping. You want to be a boy now, you’re going to need help. A tutorial. Regular boys learn this stuff along the way. You were all playing with dolls and being accepted for who you were. But don’t worry—I can catch you up. I got your back.”
She’s almost off to middle school, almost a teenager, about to start becoming a grown-up, so it’s time for her to explore and decide and be strong, to talk about who she is, to stand up for herself, and to deal with what sets her apart.” “How does she do that?” “Same way everyone else does,” he crowed. “Suffering!
You haven’t let her suffer enough. You’ve protected her too thoroughly. You’ve treated as normal something that isn’t so she hasn’t learned to live the abnormal life she actually has. You may not care, but other people will. Of course they will!
Claude was not remotely ready to rejoin the real world, but fortunately, Bangkok bore little resemblance to it.
They had not had long enough together to become close friends yet—though in fact, after Rosie left, they kept in touch for the rest of their lives—
