Death and So Forth: Stories

This business being all out of keeping with the central business of this book, it's being slid off to the back where it's in sight but held back from a certain effect of its being taken as an overstatement in the way that statements can so readily get to be held to be overmuch when beheld inside a book. Thing is, this young father I used to know used to phone me with some regularity to report to me his little girl's having said it again. "Said what?" I would say, I in my way having forgotten from the last time of the young father's phoning what it was the man had reported to me his little girl'd said. "Said she can't wait for when she gets the chance to spread Mommy's ashes on top of Mommy's grave" is pretty close to what the young father would say when he phoned. He was a truly dear friend of mine, one of my best friends ever, that guy, but hasn't phoned in years. Anyway, thing of it is, I think he thought it was cute, what the young father said his little girl said. The other thing is from somewhere in Updike, a wuffly wobbly paraphrase. It's where a father's hassled by a hapless rootless aimless son. It's when the father says to the son what on earth is going to become of you if you keep on with your cranky exasperating bootless ways, and the son, he says to the father oh I suppose the same thing that's going to become of you, the day being bound to show up when I just up and die and fall down and forever like everyone else and you be dead. This latter time around I left out the marks indicating speech since time's awasting, unless it's a wasting. Book jacket.