Happy Birthday to my mother Peggy Holmes. She is 88 years old today. Born on a farm in East Texas, she has traveled the world and is part of a generation which has seen the most calamitous events and astonishing technological transformations in the history of humankind.
Here is a story worth reading: “Tom’s Husband” by Sarah Orne Jewett. First published in February 1882 in The Atlantic Monthly. True, Ms. Jewett was an old-fashioned writer, a regional writer from Maine; also true, the story doesn’t have much dialogue and the ending is a bit forced. All the same it moves along at a nice clip. See if you don’t recognize some very modern ideas. The best storytellers, like the best poets, say things we wish we had said, only they say them better. Like this line: “Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so eager and interesting a feeling as hunger.”