Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Pick
We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, ‘magnified’ Man.
Vaults and caskets are not the law; they are the policy of individual cemeteries. Vaults prevent the settling of the dirt around the body, thus making landscaping more uniform and cost effective. As an added bonus, vaults can be customized and sold at a markup. Faux marble? Bronze? Take your pick, family.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
If you don’t like what you’re doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.
When I became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was stodgy, gray, run by elitists. I said, ‘Hey, let’s kick the thing around.’ I wanted to attract young people to the museum. I said, ‘Make it hospitable. I want them to come. I want them to make dates, pick up girls, pick up boys – either way; I don’t care.’
I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
There are moments of opportunity for families; moments they need to put technology away. These include: no phones or texting during meals. No phones or texting when parents pick up children at school – a child is looking to make eye contact with a parent!
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.