11/22/63

So in the end it only took the threat of nuclear war to bring us back together—how romantic is that?

Okay, maybe not.

“Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”

He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

There’s nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent.

The hand-printed sign above this trove, which would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms

And isn’t that what A+ writing is supposed to do? Evoke a response?

What made the job dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen teaching was apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty without knowing how to spell (totally, not todilly), or capitalize in the proper places

from small things, baby, big things one day come

Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I’d gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I’d become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I had no cell phone, and what a relief that had been. Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the majority lock their doors at night? Balls they did. They worried about nuclear war, but I was safe in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into skyscrapers.

Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam English teacher.

“Because every trip down the rabbit-hole’s a reset.” Then Al just looked at me, to see if I got it. After a minute, I did.