Late Nights on Air

She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.

You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.

Oh Harry," [Gwen] said. "I wish I were a different kind of person." What kind of person, he wanted to know. "Someone," she said slowly, "who truly loves life." He was still looking at her, still cradling his glasses in his left hand. He said, "You're the kind of person who never stops trying.

We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.

her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon.

So how did you get to be so wise?” It seemed she might not answer his question, but she did. “I read, she smiled, and he chuckled. Small-town honesty. He could recognize it a mile away. Small-town honesty, and big city drive.

The mistakes don't matter," he informed her one night after she stumbled over a station ID and apologized on air. "It's the recovery that counts." If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she'd have ten cents. She nodded sheepishly, preferring Harry's way of phrasing the same point. "I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from." Harry's advice gave her a route to follow, a path forward. Somehow Eddy managed to exchange one form of stress for another.

The phrase that came to her mind was "the long and sudden of I." We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us.

You're brave to have driven all this way." Gwen considered for a moment whether this made her brave. In truth, she was always afraid, always worried. She shook her head. "Like I said, I've always wanted to come north for as long as I can remember." "Three thousand miles!" "Yes," still unimpressed by herself," but I never went over fifty.

Overhead were ravens and lake gulls, all around were low hills made of the oldest rock in the world bathed by the most beautiful light on earth, and lovely miniature birches, and small flowers clinging and spreading.

The studio was connected by a picture window to master control, which was connected in the same way to the announce booth and the editing booth beyond that. She could see the length of the little station and into the hallway, too. And thus she was inducted into the visibility and invisibility of radio, the intimacy and the isolation.

His face reminded her of an open book that's fallen into a puddle.