Take my hand and grow young with me. Don't rush. Don't sleep. Be a beginner. Light the candles. Keep the fire. Dare to love someone. Tell yourself the truth. Stay inside the rapture.

most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.

We accumulate pain, collect it. ... We display it, stack it up into a pile, then we stack it up into a mountain, so we can climb up onto it, waiting for or demanding sympathy: Hey, do you see how big my pain is?

Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now they push us about in our chairs.

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.

How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.

Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn young how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and finally how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It's that long, smooth, false swanning through life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall.