where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams

in the most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s

predicament into a back-alley abortion-or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption. Their

very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softheaded liberals

who supported a civil rights agenda.

Sure-but would you let your daughter marry one? The fact that my grandparents had answered yes to this question, no matter how grudgingly, remains an enduring puzzle to me.

classrooms filled with farm boys who got sewn into their woolen underwear at the beginning of winter and stank like pigs as the months wore on.

where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you