Fred jerks back in his recliner as his wife puts him on the spot and asks his opinion about a dress she bought on sale at a fancy place for a great price…

We’re going dancing, my wife and… to a Charity Ball high in the sky… Glenn Miller’s band has been play… since 1944, the year his plane got… over the English Channel.

Praise for Him coming from us is like the bark of a terrier at the foot of his master

It isn’t a flophouse where Fred lives now but he calls it that a month after moving in and seeing his fellow

The hands on the atomic clock upstairs finally stopped spinning. As you know, my dear, the hands have been spinning for two weeks. This morning the clock stopped

It tears the stomach out of Roy to see old folks shopping at an all-night grocery store ancient couples, on canes and walkers

Some never hear of him and likely never will— pygmies in Africa, aborigines in Tasmania, the indigenous in South America.

I met a proper woman in a proper p… on a Monday in Peoria. I was take… she looked like Jackie after Dall… but without the pillbox hat. She was from New York and I was…

When Bernie wakes at 6 a.m. there’s a piano on his chest and Erroll Garner’s playing “Mist… Sinatra’s on the headboard improvising lyrics

So this Mick on the next stool, who’s as serious as Yeats but looks like Wilde, stares at me, with eyes crossed,

You had to have a Schwinn to lead this pack of boys riding bikes full speed baking under the Chicago sun laughing after senior year

When Martha gets home from cooking class this afternoon, Martin will be gone after 30 years of marriage. Martha won’t know why

Dither of blue jays bickering at the feeder. Doves eat well below Donal Mahoney

He remembers loving her lost in an orchard peaches, pears, apricots falling on his head every day