Section 0018

     The slow days
     Echoes heard
     In a corner of Kyoto

     I who have never known any sorrow, I touch something to increase my joy in living. 

     People remember and share these stories because they discuss timeless and placeless human situations in exciting and interesting ways.

     A frenzy, a fraud, a fiction. Many beautiful girls died in this way _____________ a woman named Scheherazade at last offered to be the Sultan’s bride.
     
     Here I wish to relate a terrible and grotesque anecdote, a scene from a family tragedy. While I was a small school boy if I was asked if I remembered her I could say “Yes; I remember playing on the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree.” Then I found I needed another girl in the story, a live one to balance the ghost girl.[2] 

     Pressing her on what kind of advances were made, she told me, “Well, when an owner of a nightclub tells you he wants you to sit with the captain of police and you say you don’t want to sit with the captain of police and he more or less tells you that he can hire four or five Puerto Rican girls for the salary he’s paying you and you tell him, ‘Well, go ahead and do it,’ and you walk out.”
     First impressions are very hard to change - and this is Monica’s first impression of how you live your life.
     At least it’s in bad taste without being pretentious.

     Having children was the major job of all classes of women in the Middle Ages, and the margins of this book are full of references to fecundity and birth.
     The Echo and her “sisters” had just time enough to unload freight and passengers and load again and depart for Pittsburgh when the Allegheny River froze up with an extremely cold March snap. The wretch’s search for justice went as well as Kobe Bryant can shoot free throws.