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These were the families we chose to be in, not the ones we were born in. It’s almost a cliché, but if Guggi and I had not found this other life, I wonder where running from our families would have led us. A very different kind of dance.
“It’s all you’ve got,” said the postman’s son. “That’s it. Your thoughts, they decide who you are.”
There’s nothing any man can make—can imagine, write, draw, or sing into being—that is as beautiful as that child in that pram. And yet the artist lives in fear of it. Why? Because it is truly creation. Ultimate creativity. The woman has this on the man.
She didn’t need me to be anyone else. She loved me.
We would discover that this special superpower was as deadly as any ballistic missile program in ensuring a president gets his message through. Charm at scale. Nuclear charm.
Hard to fix a problem that’s paying everyone’s bills.”
It was in the mid-1990s that I wrote “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” about how, if you don’t die on a cross at thirty-three, people start asking for their money back.
Living well, as someone put it, is the best revenge. Come to think of it, just living will do.
The years will always steal your glory as they offer you longevity.
Bob Hewson was a recording of many lives lived, and now we were losing the chance to access a library of information that might help us explain ourselves better.
“I think your father deserves an apology,” he scolded me. “Can you imagine this story from his perspective? Your father loses his wife and he’s left to bring up the two kids and one of them is charging in his direction, coming for him all guns blazing. One of them is going to take him out by achieving all the ambitions he was afraid to have.”
ME: “And what business does he think we need to be in?” BOBBY: “In the magic business. The same business as him, putting ten thousand songs in someone’s pocket, a magic trick.”
movie Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a biopic starring Idris Elba and Naomie Harris that explored the stormy relationship between Nelson and Winnie Mandela.
French philosopher Simone Weil is right, that “imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life,”
week before … and the month before that. ‘The Online Bonanza: Who Is Making All the Money and Why Aren’t They Sharing It?’
Were there days when both of us might resent the obligations our marriage makes of each other? Sure, but neither of us would want to live outside each other’s love as expressed through this old-fashioned but still functional construct called marriage.
We begin by looking out for our children, and in time, if we are so blessed, we find they are looking out for us.
What have I found here at the far end of experience? Gratitude.
The moment of surrender is the moment you choose to lose control of your life, the split second of powerlessness where you trust that some kind of “higher power” better be in charge, because you certainly aren’t.
So often the fight is not with the world but with yourself.
