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Snippets . . . PTD Edition

My experience last year made me think about death in a different way. I briefly blacked out and collapsed in a shopping center hallway where nice people helped me. When I looked back at the episode as a near-death experience, I thought it would be embarrassing to have my obit say, “He collapsed and died in the Atlantic Street mall outside a Marshall’s.” I did not know where I wanted to die, but it wasn’t there. Since then the spouse and I have looked at many continuing care retirement communities, or as I call each of them, a Place To Die. Both the spouse and I have posted about these travels on this blog, but our search has now ended. We have signed a contract and put a down payment to enter a CCRC in suburban New York. I have a PTD. Of course, we must now downsize and sell our Brooklyn house where we have lived for 45 years. But, I am confident that the move will come by the end of the year. I hope that it gives some interesting, perhaps amusing, blog fare.

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Mel Brooks.

“Only the young die good.” Ethel Watts Mumford.

“Dying’s not so bad. At least I won’t have to answer the telephone.” Rita Mae Brown.

“The type of man who will end up dying in his own arms.” Mamie van Doren on Warren Beatty.

“My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping.” Rita Rudner.

“God was very good to the world. He took her from us.” Bette Davis on Miriam Hopkins.

“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” Erma Bombeck.

“It is fine to speak well of the dead, but what shall we do with those who are dead and don’t know it?” Unknown.

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.” Anonymous.

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.” Mark Twain.

I told the spouse that I wanted to be cremated. She said, “When?”

“In the words of a Fula proverb: ‘Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created.’” David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black.

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First Sentences

“Not so long ago, it was less than ideal for an American politician to seem like a dumbass.” Andy Borowitz, Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.

“She got to the parking lot earlier than usual.” Natsuo Kirino, Out (translated by Stephen Snyder).

“The only lodging in Grafton was a low-slung motel with a smashed door at the entrance.” Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide.

“Vespasia stood at the long, open window of her hotel bedroom and gazed across the rooftops of the city toward the western sky.” Anne Perry, A Christmas Message.

“I didn’t spend a year building a wooden flatboat and then sailing it two thousand miles down the Mississippi to New Orleans simply because I was suffering from a Huck Finn complex, although that certainly played a part.” Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure.

“In the corner of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the political news in the Times.” Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None.

“Beginning on September 15, 1987, and continued for an amazing twelve days, the hearings over the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork for the United States Supreme Court mesmerized the nation.” Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism.

“Next to hot chicken soup, a tattoo of an anchor on your chest, and penicillin, I consider a honeymoon one of the most overrated events in the world.” Erma Bombeck, If Life is a Bowl of Cherries—What am I Doing in the Pits?

“It was as black in the closet as old blood.” Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

“The Scopes trial has dogged me for more than a decade, ever since I wrote my first book on the American controversy of creation and evolution.” Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.

“The oldest written record of the word tennis makes no mention of athletic shoes; rather, it refers solely to the sport from which they take their name; a sport that—along with fencing, its near kin—was one of the first to require a special kind of footwear.” Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death.

“Poised to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln found he could not write his name.” Noah Feldman, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America.

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First Sentences

“A brilliant flash broke the morning darkness on November 8, 2018, as strong winds pummeled a PG&E power line scaling the Sierra Nevada ninety miles north of Sacramento.” Katherine Blunt, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric—and What It Means for America’s Power Grid.

“The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below.” Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood.

“On April 3, AD 33—or perhaps three years before that—a quite dramatic event took place in the holy city of Jerusalem.” Mustafa Akyol, The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims.

“I stood in the sally port while the steel door rolled back with a clang and then I stepped through into the jail.” Michael Nava, The Little Death.

“Five years before a pair of bullets tore through his gut, Billy Joe Aplin reached over the silt-smeared water of the tidal flats with a boat hook to snare a small buoy bobbing near the grassy shoreline.” Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Fisherman and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast.

“Geneva Sweet ran an orange extension cord past Mayva Greenwood, Beloved Wife and Mother, May She Rest with Her Heavenly Father.” Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird.

“The history of Cuba begins where history begins.” Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History.

“Maurice Oulette tried to kill himself once but succeeded only in blowing off the right side of his jawbone.” William Landay, Mission Flats.

“One of the biggest complaints about motherhood is the lack of training.” Erma Bombeck, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession.

“The train had left Sacramento some distance behind, and was now bravely beginning the long climb that led to the high Sierras and the town of Truckee.” Earl Derr Biggers, Keeper of the Keys.

“On the pivotal day of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson tried to clear his mind by playing golf.” Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.

“Mr. Bowling sat at the piano until it grew darker and darker, not playing, but with Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D Flat Minor opened before him at the First Movement, rubbing his hands nervously, and staring across the shadowy room to the window, to see if it was dark enough yet.” Donald Henderson, Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper.

“There is a scheme afoot.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court.

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First Sentences

“The navy-gray paint of the trawler was faded and chipped, spattered with the excrement of gulls that jostled and shrieked overhead when the catch was good.” Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Fisherman and the Dragon: Fear Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast.

“The Pacific is the loneliest of oceans, and travelers across that rolling desert begin to feel that their ship is lost in an eternity of sky and water.” Earl Derr Biggers, The Black Camel.

“It was midmorning on Saturday, September 16, 1922, a warm but partly cloudy end-of-summer day, described in local forecasts as ‘unsettled,’ when Pearl Bahmer and Ray Schneider found the bodies.” Joe Pompeo, The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder that Hooked America on True Crime.

“It was the sort of sound you hear in the distance and mistake for something else: a dirty steam barge puffing along the River Spree; the shunting of a slow locomotive under the great glass roof of the Anhalter Station; the hot, impatient breath of some enormous dragon, as if one of the stone dinosaurs in Berlin’s zoo had come to life and was now lumbering up Wilhelmstrasse.” Philip Kerr, If the Dead Rise Not.

“The review, titled ‘A Scandal!’ fit right in on Glassdoor.com.” Jeff Kosseff, The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech.

“When you entered the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, you would first see a scale model of the studio itself.” Anthony Marra, Mercury Pictures Presents.

 “Every Friday in the late afternoon, as the sun gives way to dusk, a series of loud sirens pierce the air of a densely packed village located in a suburban town in the Catskill Mountains fifty miles north and slightly west of New York City.” Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, A Hasidic Village in Upstate New York.

“They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring, full of resolve and a measure of hope, he would marry again.” Scott Turow, The Burden of Proof.

“Amidst the leafy quietude of East Thirty-Fifth Street in Marine Park, far from the hipsters or the merchants of twee, there is a spectacle as unique and unlikely as a Hollywood stage set.” Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City.

“It was either Thomas Jefferson—or maybe it was John Wayne—who once said, ‘Your foot will never get well as long as there is a horse standing on it.’” Erma Bombeck, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank.

“Lanah didn’t understand their language, but when the foreign men started tossing out catcalls, their meaning struck home.” John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America.