I brought Astro back to the car and told Matt. Without blinking, he said, “You have to save Astro’s life, and I’ll help you.” The drive to save Astro surpassed the pain of our failed romance. We were now just two people on a mission.

Several years earlier, when I sat in traffic court, I found a woman guilty of speeding. I believed the officer, and since he’d cited her a block from my health club at about 4:50 pm, I had a hunch she was racing to a class there. “I find you guilty,” I said, then offered her traffic school. A month or so later, in my health club’s sauna, a man emerged from the steam and approached me. “Are you a judge?” he asked. Both of us were buck naked.

Every week, no matter what, she slowly savored her donut. We remaining students were like a pack of dogs, ravishing the morsel of food we took, then sadly eyeing her while she ate her share daintily, picking at little bits of donut, listening to the Cantor’s stories and dabbing her mouth with her napkin.

The sun, unrelenting now, hammers my head. Blooming white and lilac azalea flowers spill from ceramic pots that line the famous Spanish Steps. Rows of people, most sitting, their faces to the sun. The winter coat weighs on my shoulders, high heeled boots bite my toes. Greasy sweat between my breasts.

In contrast to Kandinsky’s intricate articulation (in both theory and practice) of the spiritual purpose of form, de Kooning’s work is an interesting anomaly.  It is curious that de Kooning, in this period of artistic uninhibitedness, is regarded by more than one critic as evoking a sort of vacancy in his work, a deliberate descent into visual paradox, an emptiness and a void. 

There is a Zen story in which a student’s teacher has taught the student, “When drinking tea, just drink tea,” yet the student comes across the teacher in the act of reading a newspaper while drinking tea. The teacher says, “When drinking tea and reading the newspaper, just drink tea and read the newspaper.”

Called forth by my father’s words, the cave sprung up howling in my mind. The pine trees around it lashed in the wind, lacerating the sky. Below, waves keened. Black, white, green, gray.

When Ephron began regularly writing essays for Esquire the 1970s, she must have felt a pull toward the world of quality journalism, or perhaps the editors wanted someone who could write about women’s issues for a male audience. Perhaps both. Something about these circumstances, writing for a primarily male audience about issues that interested her as a woman may have shaped the way she used tone to convey an attitude. The breezy, flippant tone of such articles as “A Few Words About Breasts,” employs humor to talk about what was beginning to be called “the male gaze.”

“Everyone will tell you that I am not a musician. That is correct. From the very beginning of my career, I classed myself as a phonometographer . . . Science is the dominating factor . . . I think I can say that phonology is superior to music…”

Inside my mother’s dark body, I developed lanugo and little limbs, my own fingerprints and bones. Her body recognized that my blood was not her own. Every part of her identified me as a pathogen and endeavored to destroy me. Instead of carrying vital oxygen and other essential nutrients, my bloodstream was contaminated with my mother’s antigens, triggering an immune response that identified me as an invader and urgently signaled for my removal and destruction.