She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead.

I won’t even give you the context. It’s good, but sometimes one’s imagination is even better.

In related bits, a friend introduced me to My Parents Were Awesome. While I understand that my parents were once my age (in fact, my mom and I met right about the time she was my age now), I’ve never really seen pictures of them without us kids. And now I really want to know what they were like.

In unrelated news, Jon Stewart’s Glenn Beck impersonation was downright inspiring. It’s not that he’s making fun of Glenn Beck — it’s that he’s taking every rhetorical strategy of Beck’s and illustrating how ludicrous they are: the word association schemes, the crazy diagrams, the appearance of being well-read without the information to back it up, the crying, the screaming, the hand-waving and -wringing  — all these are ways Beck tries (and logically fails) not so  much to win but to shut down arguments. That’s the  beauty of this — not that it’s funny, but that it’s true.

“You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” [my father] asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”

Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?

“Only then will you understand what happened and why.

“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”