When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
Similes and metaphors blah blah blah. How do you pick out the telling details? The pencilled in eyebrows, a long second toe with a gold ring and a peridot, the moles in the shape of a spade on a large man’s lower back. Panty lines, chipped plates, a piece of floss on a painted cement floor. The girl with bangs and a cello on her back. A man trying to smell his own breath. A moon that means nothing. A sunset that means less. All of nature and her cubs. A wash of guache. Some days I think I’m Michael Barbaro. Other days Mare or Mary Anning. Is it possible to be sixty years old and still walking up to cranes with the one and only essential question of the universe: are you my mother?
What was the question?
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Betsy Lerner 
I’m just a poor boy. Nobody loves me, though the gods of character lurk in the details.
[How] is it possible to be sixty years old?
Ha – Betsy (I just typed Besty – remembered the CAKE story) I have you by two years. Medicare here I come.
That post was downright poetic. That held more interesting descriptions than my current WIP.
To pick out the “telling” details – that’s what makes writing so f’ing hard.
Would you like fries with that?
Ah ha when a six precedes the zero. When a cake is too small to hold the flames. One cupcake. One candle. The wish as small as the flame. When the circle thins to one person deep and the song of it no longer fills you up but makes you feel empty.
That’s the question.
The answer…
Just wait until a seven precedes the zero. On second though don’t wait. Get your ass moving.
A small, black flip phone left behind in a restaurant. The wait staff returned it after the woman who lost it retraced her steps. Her husband, annoyed because this had happened before, glued a long, thin silver chain to the back of the device with a clasp on the other end to tether his wife to the phone.
Will she bear this indignity in obedient silence or leave him and her phone behind when she walks out the door?
The sound of light shoes
on damp grass
No matter what the question, curiosity is the answer.