What can make a sentence remarkable?
As the Celtics open the 2012-13 schedule Tuesday night in Miami against the title-defending Heat, the enigmatic Rondo — a fussy fashionista with a basketball assassin’s soul — reigns as their undisputed floor leader, a hoop savant who has come to exert more control over a championship-caliber team than any guard in franchise history since Cousy himself.
From Roger Angell’s “Long Voyage Home”
On his off days, Pedro Martinez settled capless into his upper corner of the dugout, wearing only remainder bits of the Boston uniform, and delivered momlike nods and smiles toward the unbuttoned Manny as he ambled toward the bat rack again.
I didn’t think much about my Red Sox fan-friends until the World Series was over. Now they are triumphant, and their old pains and desperate attachments have become historic and quirky. They won’t need their amulets and game-watching rituals anymore, the stuff that was mentioned in so many of the TV news stories the day after, and in some New England newspaper feature stories. A copy of the Bangor Daily News mentioned a family in Old Town that mowed a “Go, Sox” pattern in the lawn, and a ninety-four-year-old lady in Lakeville, Massachusetts, who made herself a little ceramic Fenway Park each year, with porcelain nuns at play inside.
From Roger Angell’s memoir Let Me Finish (note: this is three sentences, without a run-on!!!)
I don’t envision her much at a younger best–slim and stylish at lunch with me in Schrafft’s, around the corner from her office, in 1928, say–but instead find her sitting at the head of the dining-room table in North Brooklyn, in her seventies, with her elbow on the table and her head wearily resting in one hand while she eats.[…] Late-August sunlight falls into the room, competing with the candles, and the usual homemade mint sauce and homemade piccalilli are in their usual silver dishes. I try to imagine which of her immediate deep concerns is topmost at the moment: whether the blue Chinese willow-pattern vegetable dish on the mantel behind her should be left to Alice, as written on her current and endlessly rewritten twelve-page adjunct-to-her-will list, or, for some complex reason, to Callie or perhaps to another granddaughter altogether, Kitty Stableford; how many of her nine grandchildren attended or will ever attend a school or college where they would get to learn their way around not just Middlemarch but Cranford, too; why the cosmos, some blossoms of which are in the arrangement she’s put together this afternoon in the copper vase in the far-left corner of the living room, has been looking so leggy of late and whether the northwest bed, where the cosmos are, doesn’t need a wholesale cleanout and replanting this fall; whether Jean Stafford, the widow of Joe Liebling, was drunk again when she called last night or in the grip of something more dire; whether Edith Candage, in the kitchen, has remembered to get the dessert Floating Island egg white whipped to a proper firmness; whether poor Catharine Allen’s failing eyesight will keep her from laundering and ironing those organdy curtains, come spring, and, if not, who in the world can be found to replace her; whether Joe, away at the moment on a cruise east to the Bras d’Or in his cutter Northern Crown, may encounter the tropical depression in the Caribbean mentioned on the radio tonight; whether Roger, never as lean as his father Ernest, hasn’t picked up a bit of weight over this vacation with too much beer and too many lobsters and may be overloading his heart; why Ernest made me carry that enormous frying pan around my neck on our 1915 honeymoon camping trip, and so perhaps beginning the back troubles that have been killing me ever since; whether Vladimir Nabokov doesn’t still have a couple of pieces of short fiction in him for the magazine, and whether the current fiction department is still regularly in touch with him and Vera, and how long has it been since I’ve had a letter, one of those “V.N.” specials, from him; who that new person in checking is who last week crazily circled a phrase of Andy’s on a galley and wrote “zeugma”? in the margin; whether Milton Greenstein will call us back tomorrow about the estimated September tax figures we’ve mailed him, and about Shawn’s concerns about the paperback of the appalling Gill book; and isn’t it about time for seconds?
From Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country”
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.
From David Sedaris
I stretch out in the bathtub, soaking in the fragrant oils while outside my window beggars are gathered like kittens upon the heating grates.
A splendid one-sentence argument (Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2004):
The Republicans are here. We—we New Yorkers—hope they enjoy the amenities of our city. We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years—alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city’s suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamic terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.
Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Juggler”
A ball will bounce; but less and less.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls / To shake our gravity up.