Oh, glorious Sunday! I have been wallowing in the Sunday New York Times and I am alive with the sound of blogs. The trick is to pick one. So many things happen in a day, both external and internal, private and public, domestic and foreign. It's a wonder one can get anything practical done, with so much going on inside one's head. Pick a card, any card. Okay, I was thinking of Martin Amis's novel, Time's Arrow, that preceded that Billy Button thing, the make-up tour de force in a movie that aged and then infantilized Brad Pitt over a lifetime. Time's Arrow takes the reader through the Holocaust years showing us the wrecked bodies going into the gas chamber back through to healthy strong hopeful people coming off the trains to the camps. That's the scene I remember best. (This isn't out of my NYT reading.)

A neighbour came to tell me that her sadly debilitated husband is finally going into a long-term care facility. That's when I thought of Time's Arrow. It's a long step from kindergarten to a euphemistically named Something Gardens. Backwards isn't any better, is it?

"Backward, O backward, turn Time in thy flight, Make me a child again, just for tonight." I never knew to this moment, when I looked it up, that this line is from the poem. Rock Me to Sleep," written by Elizabeth Akers Allen. (1831-1911).

Too much.