A very new take on the "we used to be lovers, now we're strangers" song genre. Or the "road not taken" tradition.
What SB captures that no one else has is that bemusing set of feelings when you realize, as a parent, that your daughter will soon become one of those ethereal creatures that other kids will seek intimacy with, and that most seekers will fail at this, like he did "when we were seventeen" and Mary Anne was, awkwardly, "happy for me."
It's a richly observed irony that in adolescence we expend so much of our soul for intimacy and rarely get it, but to a child you just about automatically "mean the world."
A very new take on the "we used to be lovers, now we're strangers" song genre. Or the "road not taken" tradition.
What SB captures that no one else has is that bemusing set of feelings when you realize, as a parent, that your daughter will soon become one of those ethereal creatures that other kids will seek intimacy with, and that most seekers will fail at this, like he did "when we were seventeen" and Mary Anne was, awkwardly, "happy for me."
It's a richly observed irony that in adolescence we expend so much of our soul for intimacy and rarely get it, but to a child you just about automatically "mean the world."