Joclyn

“Why then, I wondered, would my brother assume that our father, so near death, might yearn for the very sounds that only a month earlier had driven him crazy? Was the incessant chatter of women more palatable from the depths of a coma? Would that noise, which had so clearly offended him, transform itself into music, simply because he was dying? How very odd and strangely amusing to think that this man, who had disdained any form of idle conversation outside of the drunken, might suddenly long to hear the raised voices of his womenfolk, mixed with the darker tones of his male progeny, and even more curious was the suggestion from our hospice nurses that our voices might have a salubrious effect on our father. It was a well-known fact, they assured us, that hearing was the last sense to go.”
― Kate Mulgrew, How to Forget: A Memoir of a Daughter's Journey of Loss and Love

“At the Emerald Isle supermarket that I stomp off to after the fight with my father, it’s Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and then the cashier, who also voted for him. Of course, these are just my assumptions. The guy in the T-shirt that pictures a semiautomatic rifle above the message COME AND TAKE IT, the one in fatigues buying two twelve-packs of beer and a tub of rice pudding, didn’t necessarily vote Republican. He could have just stayed home on Election Day and force-fed the women he holds captive in the crawl space beneath his living room.”
― David Sedaris, Calypso