Dolly Parton and Carl Dean, her husband of 56 years, when they first met in 1964.


Shuffling the deck…
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“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”
— E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web
[Read more…] about Reading Between The Lines – ‘Charlotte’s Web’
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Setting up the ladder…

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when you could leave your house and nobody knew where you were.
Think about that.
You could walk out the front door at nine in the morning, disappear for six hours, and return at three carrying a bag of Doritos and absolutely no explanation of your movements. Your mother might ask where you’d been, but this was more conversational than forensic. There was no little blue dot traveling suspiciously across a map.
You had simply been out.
symbolic

“Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power.
And now he grabbed for power with both hands.
To free his hands for the grab, he shook impatiently from them the last crumbs of the principles with which he had entered public service and for which, during his years of idealism, he had fought só hard.”
— Robert Caro, The Power Broker
[Read more…] about Reading Between the Lines – ‘The Power Broker’

Few places inspire dread quite like the DMV. You can arrive before lunch with one simple task and emerge hours later feeling as though you have survived a minor natural disaster. The chairs are uncomfortable, the lighting is unforgiving, and the person ahead of you always seems to be attempting a type of vehicle transaction never before encountered by human civilization.
So why is the DMV still this bad?
[Read more…] about Why Does Everything Take So Long at the DMV?

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn.
[Read more…] about Reading Between The Lines – ‘The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street’
