• The toy store with a security camera monitor over the display shelves.
  • The tidy workshop, with little spectacles and vintage stone grinders, in the jewelry store window.
  • The two older women with matching, laminated lanyards: “Celebrating 50 Years of Friendship!”
  • The electric wheelchair on its own, dedicated carrying trailer, brand name: “Jazzy Select.”
  • Singing “Immigrant Song” in a seductive, cabaret voice.
  • My pants cuffs, at their highest of the summer.
  • Johnny Cash, in Neil Strauss’s Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, affirming rap music: “I was working with Elvis when all these older people were saying that he’s leading our kids to hell. I thought that was the strangest thing I’d ever heard […] Then all the rock artists that came along, they said that about them, too. But it doesn’t bother me. Maybe gangsta rap does have some [bad] influence on young people, but damn, I think the six o’clock news is probably the most violent thing we hear today.”
  • Bruce Springsteen on therapy, in the same book: “I found [therapy] to be one of the most healthy experiences of my life. I grew up in a working-class family where that was very frowned upon. So it was very, very difficult for me to ever get to a place where I said I needed some help. […] But all I can say is the leap of consciousness that it takes to go from playing in your garage to playing in front of five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand people—or when you experience any kind of success at all—can be very, very demanding.”
  • How, sometimes, parents who are social workers end up with the most challenging kids of all.