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I’ve done a lot of jobs in the years since then, and my current editorial gig—probably my last gig before retirement seizes me in its claws—is terrific, but I never felt so weirdly happy, so absolutely in-the-right-place, as I did when I was twenty-one, wearing the fur and doing the Hokey Pokey on a hot day in June.
Crazy thing to say
“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,� Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.�
It was a kind of atavistic belief—a mother’s belief—that if they never started doing certain last things, life would go on as it had: morning smoothies at the end of the boardwalk, evenings with the kite at the end of the boardwalk, all of it in a kind of endless summer. Only it was October now and the beach was deserted. The happy screams of teenagers on the Thunderball and little kids shooting down the Splash & Crash water slide had ceased, there was a nip in the air as the days drew down. No summer is endless.
life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they’re precious.
