BRIEF LIVES: A collage of The Times
by Bill Kirtz ’61 

His kids loved “backwards suppers” – desserts first.
She let her ice cream melt.
It took three alarm clocks to wake him up.
She speed-dialed her mother.

Don’t grow up on me now,
He told his tiny daughter every morning.
(And every day she disobeyed.)
He waited for his secretary.

He preached a sermon in his bedroom slippers.
It was her first time in New York.
I don’t have clients, he’d say. I only have friends.
She called her airline from the back row.

He made his 6-year-old peanut butter pie.
She’d help the old man down the church steps.
He made a Lego pirate ship.
Her friends stuffed love notes in balloons,

and sent them to the sky.

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