I suppose this blog is becoming but a chronicle of how and when something moved me to tears, but this small paragraph is undeniably worth posting for its tenderness.

"But I never stopped trying to match that evening--not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later--after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown--I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way--if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I ased her if we could have dinner sometime--I would have been devastated."

Calvin Trillin, "Alice, Off the Page," The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, 47.