While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life. ###

“Then she heard herself speak as if the voice was coming out of somebody else’s body, slow as tar drying.”
—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
--A Kind of Freedom

At our reunion after years of cross-country phone calls, my best friend leaned toward me across the restaurant table. She was catching me up about being the live-in caregiver of her thousand-year-old mother, who had dementia. Days crammed with appointments with legal, medical, financial, and social work bureaucrats. She was pissed, and I've always been terrified by anybody's anger. Adult day care, abusive help, expensive help, and no help. She stabbed the air with her fork. Family who refused to help. I flinched. Her rage was a blast furnace. “And everybody's telling me to stop being mad.”
 
And my voice said. “Ignore. Everybody. You’re totally worn out. Keep your anger—it’s the only fuel you’ve got left.”

The flames died down. She settled back in her chair. “Thank you,” she said.

Then we gossiped about our college days.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

####

“The crowd hushes like a dying breeze.”
—Jewell Parker Rhodes
--Black Brother, Black Brother

Transplanted from California to St. Louis, I was alone in the apartment I’d just moved into. My windows overlooked a bustling intersection. Car radios blasted. Hot humid wind carried the noise of summer foot traffic, hey mama a counterpoint to what choo lookin at boy. A couple of blocks away, Highway 40 hummed. I took a break from unpacking and lay down for a nap.

I startled awake.

Is that an air raid siren?

I looked out the window. The streets were deserted. The sky was green.

War of the Worlds was playing out in real life, as it had in my childhood nightmares, when I’d hid in my closet.

I turned on the television to the urgent drone of weathermen on every chanel. Tornado. “Within the sound of my voice, seek shelter.”

I crawled into the closet.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

###

“If the doctor was wrong and I’m not dying, it will be a major disappointment.”

Isabel Allende
Violeta
About to spring out of bed for my morning walk, I notice my breath is shallow. I can’t pull in enough oxygen. The effort grows more intense. Is this the shortness of breath that sends COVID sufferers to the ER? Is this what a female heart attack looks like? I might be dying. There’s a moment of panic. The Buddha said dying, like everything else, is a series of sensations. I should observe the sensations as they rise and fall.
Yes, I might be dying. Die consciously.
Wait a minute. I’ve got to write about this. The gaps between my breaths. The death rattle. The light. The soul floating on the ceiling. It will be my most brilliant essay. That Nobel Prize for Literature is mine, baby. But then, dammit, I don’t die.