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  1. The New York Times CompanyEdwidge Danticat8/10/2011 min
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    The New York Times Company
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    • jeff3 years ago

      Really great short story! The article title and description in the AOTD email don't do it justice. I almost missed this one. Thanks for posting @DellwoodBarker and also thanks for the illuminating comment that pushed me to read it!

      • DellwoodBarker3 years ago

        Thank you, Jeff, and thank you for All the Incredibly Hard Work you dedicate to RU software development. I sincerely hope you Experience Our Readership Gratitude enough.

    • DellwoodBarker3 years ago

      OMG. This is a glorious sucker-punch. The bookend cave intro and outro really create an incredible love story space for the reality in-between. The final paragraph is muah. I also love that this is referencing our current relevant pandemic without being explicitly spoonfed the jargon and keywords of 2020/2021.

      Umpfff.... this is a great conversational snapshot:

      When his parents call, she asks if they want her to add them to her call to him later on that night. They could tell him stories, folk tales or family anecdotes, remind him of things he’d loved and treasured when he was a boy.

      “Give him a reason to come back to us,” his mother summarizes what Marie-Jeanne is struggling to say.

      “It’s not fully up to him, is it?” his father interrupts. He sounds distant, as though speaking from another extension, in another room, rather than on speaker on his wife’s cellphone.

      “I know he wants to come back to us,” her mother-in-law says. “We’re praying all the time. I know he will.”

      And then this paragraph makes me want to be a better lover to those I really care about intimately. I love the nature of relationship Presence and Depth modeled here so simply:

      Tonight she might retell him everything he’d told her about the caves. She would remind him too of how when she seemed hesitant to “plunge in” so soon after they’d met, he asked her to pick one thing about him to focus on at a time, one thing that could make her forget everything else. Today that thing is the caves. Tomorrow it might be Nina Simone. Again. The next day, it might be the bobbing of his head when he was talking about something he loved, or how she could predict his next move by looking past the nerdy glasses and into his eyes.

      • Jessica3 years ago

        DellwoodBarker — this is such a beautiful and powerful read. Thank you for sharing 🙏 There is a lot to contemplate about what it means to love. What that word weaves in emotion and action.