Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

Sure, Bob Dylan had some good songs. But he could have been a doctor.

She didn't want to be considered a woman yet, wasn't ready to be the recipient of jewelry from men.

Like the rest of the city, LAX is coming of age.

Women did what strawberry plants did before they shot out their thin vines: the quality of the green changed. Then the vine threads came, then the buds. By the time the white petals died and the mint-colored berry poked out, the leaf shine was gilded tight and waxy.

He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand—no longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground.