Knowledge Of Our Own Mortality Is The

In The Same Way The Brits Had To Get Used To The Idea That The Sun Had Set On The British Empire, I Think That There's The Subrosa Feeling That We Are At The End Of The American Century, And I Think That's Very, Very Hard For Americans To Take.

For Most Of My Adult Life, I Have Been An Emotional Hit-and- Run Driver--that Is, A Reporter. I Made People Like Me, Trust Me, Open Their Hearts And Their Minds To Me, And Cry And Bleed On To The Pages Of My Neat Little Notebooks, And Then I Went Back To A Safe Place And Made A Story Out Of It.

This Is How I Learn Most Of What I Know About My Children And Their Friends: By Sitting In The Driver's Seat And Keeping Quiet.

A Week In The Hospital She Had Told Us. A Hysterectomy, She Had Said. It Had Seemed Unremarkable To Me In A Woman Of Forty-six Long Finished With Childbearing, Although Every Day That I Grow Older I Realize There Is Never Anything Unremarkable About Losing Any Part Of What Makes You Female - A Breast, A Womb, A Child, A Man.

That Is Supposed To Be The Rallying Cry Of Women In The Age Of Aids: No Condom, No Sex. But The Dirty Little Secret Is That The Rallying Cry Is A Whisper.... The Great Unspoken On The Heterosexual Aids Front Has Been How Behavior Is Still Determined By The Old Psychosexual Minuet Of The Sexes, The Lack Of Responsibility In Young Men And Of Assertiveness In Young Women.