Excerpts from | WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE "Eight years and four jobs and five pregnancies and meetings and train schedules and formula and diapers and deadlines and clients and mortgage and croup and a revolving door of baby nurses and Dan stagnating in that civilian job I convinced him to take when the Air Force wanted him back for Korea of all things, they got Elvis, they didn't need Dan, a man of his age, for crying out loud, and after what they did to him in that hospital upstate..." "The important things said between husbands and wives aren't said in words. Sighs, and sounds from cups placed too hard on saucers, zippers ripping like plows, the dogs' names barked, 250 pounds hitting the floor are like radio transmissions, all snaps and pops and fizzles full of invective, conveying what words can't. It's not the music we thought we'd hear coming through the trees fourteen years ago, but it is what came to us and it is what stuck in our heads and my only hope is that the boys are able to get the tune out of theirs and not wake to it for the rest of their lives." "In the country, I was told, "'neath the sun and the moon and the big dipper' and not some dim verkakte bulb you'd have to call the super at least once a month to replace, you could walk like a human being down your own flat path to your own front door, past the bright, blinking gazes of furry little woodland things and not the fish-eyed surveillance of the couple in 3C that in four years you've never seen more of than their his-and-hers irises. You could, I was told, and I admit, I believed it and liked the idea of it, you could, in the country, whistle a happy tune down your own flat path to your own front door and, without juggling your grocery bags or hanging your dry cleaning off your lower bridgework so you can free a hand to fish for your keys, simply open it." "Sir or Daddy, Mommy or Myrmy; do any of us ever really measure up in the moments that matter most? Can any of us ever forgive ourselves for the two halves that never quite come whole? Or must we atone for the rest of our lives for the people we don't have it in us to be?"