A literacy conference last year included a panel of authors of children’s books. The panel was attended by teachers — classroom and reading — and a smattering of school librarians. When the authors spoke, they one by one showed their books to the audience, which included quite a few heads nodding seriously, as if they were actually being told some truths about literacy and not being shown goods to buy. Well, that was shocking. One expects more from an audience than to be so easily hawked to. Really now, teachers, librarians? “Buy my book” is an okay thing to say to you? And writers! Doesn’t your profession, your talent, your expertise give you a single insight on the problems of literacy in our schools unrelated to your wallet?

Once upon a time there was a person who viewed the neighbor-to-neighbor relationship as transactional: “I have invited you to dinner, now you should buy a bag of my home-made granola.” I suppose that somewhere along the way these particular authors had been instructed that a panel on literacy was a good huckstering opportunity. Did their publishers tell them that, or had their parents raised them to view others as potential customers?

Must remember to bring books and a calculator to the next funeral reception.

. . . didn’t want to be buried all the way down in Virginia with his father. A wounded and decorated veteran of the Normandy campaign, he was seventy-eight when a stroke sent him tumbling down the stairs toward the front door. His son later wiped blood from the carpet where his old white head had struck the floor, but he apparently kept this fact from his mother.

According to the brochure literature, burial at Arlington for a veteran includes a place for the spouse, but their visit there did not at all make obvious where one might be put. The stones were awfully close.

After his elder brother died, and sometime after the shock of all of that lessened, his mother decided that he was dearer to her in some ways than her husband (though this may be an oversimplification, entered into the record to quicken the telling), that Virginia was so far, and that her life was here, so she’d rather lie beside him; him, who also happened to drop dead, although the distance was not so great, perhaps as short as from the bed to the floor. There was also some carpet work to be done there but not by him: between the removal of the body and the brother’s coming two days before Christmas, the landlord snipped away a square yard’s worth of rug.

In September when she was found, her now-only son, the one we’re talking about, called the same fine and happy fellow who had carved the first monument and asked him to make a second in the same style. Notwithstanding the three years that had passed, the carver remembered, and a price and schedule was fixed. So that much was set. Later, he (the living brother) learned that the monument maker would match the stones (side by side plots had been arranged courtesy of the cemetery manager) by rubbing the existing one and carving the new one in a like manner.

“Rubbing?” the son asked the cemetery manager. “Isn’t there a ‘style’ for markers? Like, the first was a Number 3 stone; I’ll have another of those . . . ?”

The manager laughed and laughed, a sound that had the oddest effect in the quiet graveyard where they waited for the priest, and something was said about the carver being “old school.” It may have been the brother who came up with this phrase. More laughter. It was September, a pleasant morning, and a Friday.

There was much more to tell, more details to report and notes to be made, but he couldn’t do it just then, so the fabric of the tale remains a bit thin. A bit. His last name.

Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.

— George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys . . .