On dairy cream nowadays, they write “Best if used before . . .” Well, honey, my last safe-fresh year was, oh, around nineteen and fifty-one.

Long before they planted beets in Argus and built the highways, there was a rail road. Along the track, which crossed the Dakota-Minnesota border and stretched on east to Minneapolis, everything that made the town arrived.

Oh, those oranges arriving in the midst of the North Dakota winters of the forties—the mere color of them, carried through the door in a net bag or a crate from out of the white, winter landscape.

Sampson, Skipworth, Slonecker, Small, Smiley. Smiley, Grover T. There are still four people ahead of me on the list, I’ve got awhile to wait.

I have a sister named Alice who’s only eight months older than I am. The reason for this eludes most people. My parents adopted Alice before they figured out my mother was already pregnant

No sooner had I finished working, finished assembling the final cut of my movie, finished adjusting, finished revamping, finished splicing the last two images together, finished mixing the last two sets of sounds,

The name she was unable to remember was torturing her. She kept coming up with Bechamel, which was ridiculously wrong yet somehow close. It was important to her that she remember.

In the airport limousine on the way into New Orleans, the driver says, “See that cemetery we’re passing? In New Orleans, no one is buried underground—dig five feet and you hit water.

One afternoon during the rainy and cold summer of 1977, I set out with my son Joen in a white painted, but very leaky motorboat, out of Amanningen at Flodhall, through Virsbo Lock, where the big trucks rumble over the bridge and where the children splash in the sluice basin,

He was no Joltin’ Joe, no Sultan of Swat, no Iron Man. For one thing, his feet hurt. And God knows no legendary immortal ever suffered so prosaic a complaint.