Oh, well, grandchildren. I've never felt they had that much to do with me.

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries BC, and it was a boy's lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hairspray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggies as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

Maggie thought of last summer when her old cat, Pumpkin, had died. His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence - the lack of his furry body twining between her ankles whenever she opened the refrigerator door, the lack of his motorboat purr whenever she woke up at night.