|
930cfcb
|
wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
edf0aa0
|
Everything I touch turns to shit, he thinks, not with self-pity, but with an almost scientific fascination at the truth of it.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
189a82d
|
Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
9bb0306
|
Forgiveness is a comfort, but it doesn't bring back what you lost
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
bc758ab
|
Relationships don't come with a warranty and being in love is no guarantee of a happy ending.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
6fae10b
|
If anything, love is just a starting point. Then life intrudes, along with the personal baggage you've spent years packing, and things get royally and irrevocably fucked up. You can get bitter or you can keep trying. Most people do some of each.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
b4ee047
|
It's actually somewhat common for people facing death to reach out to God," Boner says, in the exact same self-important, didactic tone he employed as a kid when explaining to us what a blow job was."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
8589185
|
For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at bay with facials, compression undergarments, and aggressively fashionable skirts bought off the rack at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
4665652
|
What do you mean by that, Paul?" We are ending our sentences with names, which is the equivalent of fighters circling, looking to throw the first punch."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
d35af3c
|
We should have a handout at the door to speed things along, a brief summary of Dad's illness and all that transpired in the final days, maybe even a photocopy of his charts and a four-color printout of his last CAT scan, because that seems to be what all of his and Mom's peers want to talk about. And at the bottom of the handout a simple asterisked declaration would state that it's of absolutely no interest to us where you were when you fou..
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
64922b3
|
Elmsbrook is the perfect town for a serial killer, and I mean that in the best possible way.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
54ae398
|
He shakes his head and grimaces. "I need to get my own place, like, yesterday." "So why don't you?" He taps his head. "Brain injury. There are things I can't do." "Like what?" "Like remembering what the fuck it is I can't do." He opens the passenger door and throws himself down in the seat."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
eac9c7d
|
Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he'll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face and red eyes will seem entirely appropriate.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
a955e80
|
This happens a lot, I've noticed. People form shiva alliances, arriving together to eliminate the risk of a one-on-one with the bereaved.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
4f932b1
|
The cop looks annoyed, like we're giving him a headache. I want to explain everything to him, show him that it's really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
c22f78d
|
Once, when I was old enough to ponder these things and young enough to think there might be credible answers, I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, "Do you believe in God?" "Not really," he said. "No." "Then why do we come here?" He sucked thoughtfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me, draping me under his musty woolen prayer shawl, and then shrugged. "I've been wrong before," he said. And that pretty much summed up ..
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
9e3e18b
|
At seventy-two years old, women can still run roughshod over your heart. That's something that never occurred to me, and I find it terrifying, but oddly reassuring.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
36964fd
|
No one under eighty moves to Florida. Isn't that like a federal statute or something?
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
101bf0a
|
You didn't invent grief. My shrink once told me that." "Really? Your shrink told you about me?"
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
caf58dd
|
A problem is something to solve. If there's no solution, it's not a problem, so stop treating it like one.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
a92d1e2
|
You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
5fdc007
|
Fate. Destiny. God. It's all a crock. People want their lives to make sense, want to sit back like cosmic detectives and examine what's happened to them so far, identifying the key turning points that shaped them and retroactively imbuing these moments with a mystical aura, like the celestial forces of the universe are a team of writers on the serialized television show of your life, charged with concocting outrageously convoluted plotlines..
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
524c45f
|
back (thank god for office accessorizing, the last playground of the reluctant adult).
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
0723610
|
Young people with terminal illnesses develop a whimsical, slightly sarcastic sense of humor about it to put everyone else at ease and to serve as shining examples of grace in the face of colossally fucked-up events.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
d87b865
|
if there is an afterlife, then nothing here mattered, and if there isn't an afterlife, nothing here mattered.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
e840f7e
|
We have always been a family of fighters and spectators. Intervening with reason and consideration demonstrates a dangerous cultural ignorance.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
4b33f0b
|
I'd always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I'd joined them did I come to understand that it's all just a much more sophisticated and elaborate way of being broke. There's the jumbo mortgage, the home equity loan to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms, the two or three monthly luxury car payments; before you know it, you've spent a hundred grand of po..
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
044708b
|
I'm sorry." I know it's the universal default, but the problem is, one's first knee-jerk response when someone says "I'm sorry" is to say "It's okay." We are programmed from kindergarten, from the first time the inevitable snot-nosed kid knocks over our blocks, to forgive. And it's not okay, it's as far from okay as it can really get, but there you are, tricked by a sociolinguistic tic into affirming that it is."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
f221451
|
She's pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
e3ed046
|
If I were an athlete I'd be past my prime. If I were a dog I'd be dead. Thirty . . . shit.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
38c13d2
|
You swear you'll never become your parents. You listen to edgy music, you dress young and hip, you have sex standing up and on kitchen tables, you say "fuck" and "shit" a lot, and then one day, without warning, their words emerge from your mouth like long-dormant sleeper agents suddenly activated. You're still young enough to hear these words through the ears of the teenager sitting beside you, and you realize how pitiful and ultimately fut..
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
925b7a3
|
The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don't believe for a minute he doesn't know it.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
06a270d
|
As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage to being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
00f4031
|
Okay. Here's what I've learned. You can live your life being nice to everyone, you can be a loving son, a moderately decent student, never do hard drugs or impregnate anyone's daughter, be an all-around good guy and live in harmony with all of God's creatures. But crash one stolen Mercedes in front of the police station when you're fifteen years old and they'll never let you forget it.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
66d031c
|
This was his childhood, safe and warm and brightly lit, and being here now makes him feel like he died years ago and he's now a lost spirit, stuck between worlds with unfinished business.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
372e20d
|
She looks at him for a long moment, then sighs deeply. "Silver," she says, her voice tinged with a profound sadness with which he is all too familiar. All the things you can't get back, all the things you can never make right. No matter what happens after, you'll always carry them with you."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
ab3411e
|
There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
035a6e1
|
Because the thing of it is, no matter how much you enjoy sex, there's something jolting and strangely disturbing about witnessing the sex of others. Nature has taken great pains to lay out the fundamentals of copulation so that it's impossible to get a particularly good view of the sex you're having. Because when you get right down to it, sex is a messy, gritty, often grotesque business to behold: the hairs; the abraded, dimpled flesh; the ..
|
|
natural
sex
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
697e23a
|
one of the lounge chairs. Serena
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
321d6e1
|
It's hard to know where to start. Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts. All you can ever really know is that it's wrapped around you, sometimes a little tighter than you'd like. But clearly there have been some mistakes. Bad ones. You can tell that just by looking at him.
|
|
mistakes
one-last-thing
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
d85a8a2
|
People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald's for making them fat pigs.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
24369ab
|
I'll never fully understand the agenda of angry breast-feeders.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
13f6569
|
I think about making a list of all the things I need to tell people before it's too late.
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |
|
eb2689a
|
Why'd you come to me?" "Really?" "Yeah." "I care less about letting you down."
|
|
|
Jonathan Tropper |