New Yorker Fiction: “Ghosts” by Edwidge Dandicat

Edwidge Danticat’s story “Ghosts” in the Nov. 24 edition of the New Yorker focuses on a young man living in Haiti among slums and gangsters. Danticat’s style is more reportage than description. Told in third person, the story avoids delving too deep in the mind of the protagonist, Pascal, or giving us any real description of setting. We are given facts, some thoughts, and little else.

The story does, though, go deep. Pascal, a young man trying to find his way and avoid the lifestyle that surrounds him, falls into the fantasies that trap many of us. Dreaming of hosting his own radio show, he imagines,

It would be controversial at first, but soon people would tune in by the thousands. A kind of sick voyeurism would keep them listening, daily, weekly, monthly, however often he was on. People would rearrange their schedules around it. They wouldn’t be able to stop discussing it.

The fact-based style doesn’t illuminate or excite. The reader may be interested in finding out what happens, but he isn’t captivated. Only near the end does Danticat open the story up some, stepping away from the action, to go deeper, with Pascal again fantasizing about, this time, a new radio program:
He would open with a discussion of how many people in Bel Air had lost limbs. Then he would go from limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family—siblings, parents, children—and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor.

“Ghosts” tells of a life, a world about which I know nothing, which I can hardly understand. It does come close to helping me comprehend the problem.

WSJ Editorial Throws Cold Water on Geithner Nomination

After the Dow rallied nearly 500 points on Friday after the leak that President-elect Obama would nominate Timothy Geithner to be the new Treasury Secretary, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has decided take an ideological view of the choice. Instead of providing the reliable, business-centric view of the economy and Obama's choice, the Wall Street Journal seemed to think it should contradict the market, who obviously approved of the choice (as I write this Monday morning, the market is up another 170 points).

Demonstrating the skewed take on the current situation, the editorial reads, "The uncertainty over Obama's team and its direction has itself been fueling the lack of confidence, so we're glad to see the President-elect getting on with the show." Undoubtedly, a period of transition affects confidence, but when the current administration decides to sit on the sidelines during a crisis, it hardly helps anything.

I expect to disagree with the WSJ editors when it comes to politics, but it is disappointing to see the editors' political ideology to interfere with their ability to see things clearly and offer the proper reassuring opinion necessary in the current economic situation.

How does it sound? President-Elect Obama

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the next President of the United States. I am, of course, pleased that the man I backed from the beginning actually won the election (that hasn't happened in many, many years), but while watching him come out to deliver his victory speech I was proud of our country. Much has been made in the last few days about the significance of his race, but it does say something to me personally about who we are that the majority of us voted for him. During the primaries, realizing that I really like Obama, I thought to myself that he never had a chance. "He's a black guy with a funny name; what chance does he have?" Yet, here we are.

I could talk too about what this means politically, what it tells me, but there are a hundred journalists out there slicing up the data and making pronouncements about the state of the country. It is different, for me, to feel that a majority of people have come around to my point of view.

And what a weight is lifted, having the election behind us. I didn't realize how much stress the whole thing was causing. Now we get to get on to real policy issues, the meat of the matter. This, really, is what I like. I could even go on about the decision Obama has made in the last few days and the implication of them, but there are others out there, who watch this even closer than I do, who could do a better job of it. All I should say here is that I'm pleased and proud about how the whole thing has worked out.

Our Moment in History

(I originally wrote this on 8/31/08 and meant to post it immediately thereafter. It's less timely now, but still worth posting.)

This week we were witness to an historical event and we must remember this moment. When Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for President, he became the first person of African descent to be a major party nominee. I am pleased with his nomination for many reasons that having nothing to do with this historical fact, but this fact may tell us something about where we've come as a country. It was not all that long ago that blacks didn't even have the right to vote in this country. And by itself that was a long way to travel from the time before the Civil War when they had no rights at all.

Of course, it cannot be said that he nominee's race is not an issue. In the primary, as it will be in the general election, many voted, if not primarily at least in part, on race. There are still those who believe that black man should know his place or think that his race means that his politics are suspect. This thinking is abhorrent, but it does not please either when I hear of people voting for him simply because he is black. (Funny how hard it is to right that word.)

While I suspect the eagerness of some to see a man succeed despite the societal hindrances of his race, I want certain things out of my President that have not a thing to do with his or her race.

Serendipitously, I'm currently reading Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children, a brilliant collection of short stories by an African American author. Here, the race only matters because the race maters for many of his characters, despite my ability to forget their race or the author's. And as much as the press has been exercised in discussions of race and the biographies of the Obamas, I've been especially tuned to the struggles particular to their race. I was stunned to hear commentators seeming to learn for the first time about a family's move from the south to attempt a new life in the industrial north. Apparently, they've never read any African American literature. Makes me wonder how they would react to reading Invisible Man. And what stereotypes would they form after reading it?

Despite Thursday night's event taking place here in Denver, I like most people watched on TV as Obama accepted the nomination and delivered a speech on America's Promise with great pride. I was not only proud that the candidate who I supported during the primaries was actually going to be the party's nominee, I was also proud of my country. Now, I want him to win and such a win will say a great deal about where we are as a country. Winning the nomination, though, out of a field of candidates whose views are not altogether disparate tells me much about where we are today. And I'm pleased and prideful to be a witness to this moment in history.

The Importance of a Good Gift

When I was, I'll say, six or seven, I found under the Christmas tree a plastic typewriter with my name on it. I wonder if it was at this point that writing got into my blood. I can't think there were many my age excited as I was to get this gift.

A Coyote in the Valley - An Excerpt

Troy focused on the ball as he prepared to kick it. It was a large one with green swirls through white, the fun kind that you can buy out of the big bins at the IGA, but today he did not kick it in fun. He gave it a solid kick against the grayed boards of what used to be a chicken coop and then jumped quickly to recover the bounced ball before it snagged on the barbed wire fence that separated the yard from the neighboring property. The small old coop sat back against the dark trees of the McAllister’s place. Troy had to be careful to keep the ball from hitting the barbed wire fence. If the ball hit one of those barbs, that would be the end of the ball, and his game.

It was one of those summer days where there did not seem to be enough to do. Troy did not really want to do anything, but he definitely did not want to be burdened with some little girl. Sarah, his eight-year-old sister, sat in the deep grass near by, while Troy kicked the ball, again and again, against the side of the weathered shack. His father was across the yard next to the tan rock of the driveway, building a doghouse for his Malamute, a fluffy black and white, blue-eyed dog. Another dog had been found shot about a mile down the road, so his father had tethered the dog to the front steps of the house without shelter from the sun. Only after noticing that the dog no longer bothered to get up when he drove into the drive did the father decide that a doghouse might be needed.

Book Review: Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

About two weeks ago I finally finished this book. It took a long time. I liked the stories in general, but when a collection gets to this size, it's hard to like them much when you pass 600 pages. Even though I many have suffered from some bias by the length and repetitiveness of anything this long, I think the early stories were the best. There's a bit of the Southern Gothic in them. Killers and losers appear here next to innocents. Welty, though, doesn't impose a morality on these characters, or on us. Inf act , reviewing the last lines of some of these early stories, there really is a kind of existentialism:

- "Billy boy....flung back the words, 'If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?'"
- "You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done."
- "...I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen."

As the stories advance in years, Welty draws more on Southern rural life and all its aspects and less on the drama of the early stories. These middle stories, focusing on a single community and its inhabitants at various points in time, are rich. Yet at the same time they have new elements that enrich them, they lack some of what I enjoyed most out of the early stories.

My interest had wained by the time I got to the last third of the collection. There was nothing bad or even frustratingly pointless here, but I was ready to move on by the time I reached page 400.

Welty is a remarkable writer, I just wouldn't recommend this collection in this form to anyone. Instead, go with the novels, Delta Wedding or The Optimist's Daughter, or one of the original (smaller) short story collections and you'll be mighty impressed.

A shift in objective

It is funny how sometimes I feel I have nothing to say and then other times I feel like I could sit down and bang out 5000-word essays non-stop. I've been coming up dry when it comes to blogging. I still like the idea, but there have been so many occasions when I don't feel like anything I say is worth putting out there into the ether to be read by my extremely limited internet audience. And the less I post, the more that audience shrinks.

Yet, I want to be writing. I am willing to take on the most uninteresting of journalistic assignments in order to be writing and to have my name out there in the world--and in print. The trouble is that I remain conscious of a future audience. I worry that the words I write will somehow negatively influence some one's decision about me. It could be a future or current employer. I'd love to write about the Russian-Georgian conflict of last week, but it is likely to be a sensitive issue for people in my organization and I'd be better served by staying silent on the issue. And there's always the idea that sometime in the future my children might get a hold of my writing. If course I'd really be in trouble if they ever began reading through my journals.

For some time I've had the notion of changing the purpose of the blog. There are plenty of people writing about books and writing, and while I'm not likely to stop doing that, there's no reason to compete with people who could do a better job. It is better to capitalize on my unique position, using my life, my personality and personal predicaments instead. And at the same time it would better show case my writing abilities, which really should be the purpose behind the blog.

The work-life-writing balance, an issue that has plagued me for some time, and inspired many too many journal entries, is about to get worse as it, again, becomes the work-life-writing-school balance. I imagine that there are few MFAs out there pursuing MBAs. By shifting the blog's objective somewhat I might actually end up writing more and writing better and more interesting posts.

Mechanisms - An Excerpt

He heard the gunshot, a sudden popping that echoed through the neighborhood’s narrow yards, but he didn’t register it. As Fred sat in his backyard in the growing dusk of a late summer evening, he was looking at the moving blades of grass, the maniacal dance of the leaves of the single elm in the small yard, and he was wishing he could pave it all over with concrete. The movement of these living things, the intangibility of these natural mechanisms, distressed him.

For over twenty-five years Fred had worked in maintenance in one of St. Louis’s largest skyscrapers. His days were spent in the chasms under the building, walking the catwalks among the hulking tanks, the gasping pipes and machines that ran the heating and cooling for the building’s fifty floors. In this sub-basement with its sparse light, with his coffee in his metal thermos and his calendar of topless women in tool belts from a parts supplier hanging above his workbench, Fred was at home. These machines were things that he could comprehend, machines that could be fixed with a wrench, with getting your hands dirty, understood by reading a gauge. The steel and grease, the dials and gauges, were things that he could put his large hands on. The grass and the tree were living things he could not bear to touch. He could not understand their living, their growing.

If the yard were concrete he would mind less these evenings spent sitting in a lawn chair with a six-pack of Schlitz. Nonetheless, it was more peaceful for him outside than inside with his wife and the endless chatter from the television as she watched Hollywood Squares and Wheel of Fortune. Together, he and Sarah had three boys, each of which proved a disappointment in one way or another.

Their youngest, Billy, who was born William, but at twelve had not yet grown out of the youthful nickname, was out this night using up his last free minutes before the regime of the school year returned. School had proven difficult for Billy on two fronts. The schoolwork seemed to challenge him in unexpected ways, but school was a bigger problem for Billy socially. Fred was frustrated by the frequency with which Billy received black eyes and fat lips, of how often a new bike, wrist watch, or school book was stolen. Billy would often dismiss the loss of some treasured object as his own mistake, he’d misplaced the watch, forgotten to lock up the bike, but Fred knew better. His thickness as a youth had put him often on the other side of such things. With his height and broad shoulders, Fred had used his size to intimidate others, and now he found himself with nothing to say to his youngest son, avoiding him.

Who knew Issac Hayes wrote "Hold On, I'm Coming"?

He also wrote Sam and Dave's "Soul Man," but I can't think of that without thinking of the Blues Brothers.

NPR replayed an old Fresh Air interview with Issac Hayes last night. I loved the theme from Shaft, but I had not idea how influential he was. RIP.

The Disguise - An Excerpt

The four of them sat, two on each side of the dining room table, and on the table between them lay what remained of their dinner, plates crusting with the remnants of chicken and pasta with white sauce and stir-fry vegetables. A second bottle of wine was only half full. Isaac carefully noted the table (natural pine), the silverware (hammered), the dishes (store-brand). A desk with a computer sat in the darkness of a corner of the dining room. Under the table, Amy, his wife, squeezed his knee lovingly. The conversation lulled.


"It's a nice house you have." Amy broke the temporary silence. It had been clear to Isaac that she didn’t understand why they were all friends.


"Thanks." Mark included himself.


"Mark always wants to do something else to it. He wants to put French doors where this window is here, so we can walk right out onto the patio." Elizabeth gently patted Mark's shoulder. "But, we never get around to it."


"Oh yeah, Amy thinks she's going to paint the bedroom. She has the paint chips and everything. It's still white, though." Isaac stared at Mark, with his close cropped blond hair and the perpetual smirk he wore. He couldn’t help but believe Mark was laughing at him behind that smug expression.


"Amy, how's the nursing home?" Elizabeth asked.


"It's good."


"Don't people die there all the time?" Elizabeth put her elbows out on the table, brushed her hair back before setting her chin in her hands. "I know it sounds morbid, but how do you get used to it?"


"I don't know." Amy glanced at Isaac. "They don't die that often, really." She paused. "I guess you just don't get that close to them."


"Oh, it sounds awful. I'd be crying all the time. I remember I was volunteering at the hospital, what was it, senior year?" She asked Isaac.


He nodded, remembering.

When the Past Comes Back

In many of my stories is a recurring theme of someone who is cut off from his/her past and is afraid of it coming back. I have to admit that I share this sentiment. And my past has come back, in the form of my entire high school graduating class. Next year is my 20-year high school reunion (quick, do the math) and in advance of it someone has set up a website for everyone to reconnect. Well, they are reconnecting.

On the website, people who haven't talked in twenty years are now leaving each other comments, leaving each other messages, and posting pictures. My in-box is full of messages of people, people I barely remember, leaving me comments or adding me as a "friend."

I have to say--and I'll say it knowing that some of these same people might read this--I find the whole thing creepy.

I am cut off from my past. I hardly feel like I ever could have been the person I was then. And know I'm being invited to relive that. Maybe these people all had a better experience there than I did. I am just not too eager to be a part of any of it. I'd would simply like to on as if none of it ever happened. Anything wrong with that?

From the Kansas Roadside

Deeann - An Excerpt

Ever since she had passed three hundred pounds, Juliet found it hard to do much. And it became hard to keep up with her eleven-year-old daughter. "Deeann!" Juliet shouted, pushing the screen door open with her thick hand and stepping with calloused and dirty bare feet onto the concrete of the front porch. Winded from the twenty steps that she had taken from the kitchen to the porch, Juliet pressed her shoulder against the vinyl siding of the duplex, and took a drink from the sweating Diet Pepsi can in her hand. "Deeann!" She shouted again, her voice sharp and piercing, with its Missouri accent. Then she quietly murmured, "So help me girl, you’d better learn to come when your momma calls."

From the shade of the porch Juliet looked out on the barren area where Deeann was allowed to play. It was supposed to have been a small development of duplexes to house the families of men who worked at the grain mill. It was started in the eighties when some large conglomerate had bought the independent mill, and the prospect was that production would increase, more people would move to Hurdland to work at the mill. After a year under new ownership, the mill was closed. Most of the men were out of work, and a large exodus followed.

What remained of the low-income development was an intersection of two short stretches of black top, lined with its white curbs without sidewalks, storm drains forming a triangle at the intersection as if it were a legitimate suburban street. Juliet and her daughter lived where one road ended at the perpendicular meeting of the other, in one of the only five squat buildings that were constructed. One of these pastel colored buildings was never fully completed, and the particleboard that had been put over the windows and doors did not keep out the teenagers from the neighboring trailer park. In front of the row of homes, a strip of blacktop stretched to the two-lane state highway. On either side were the barren plots of future homes. The ground there had been leveled for construction, leaving two flat fields where nothing grew but brown weeds and assorted clumps of green crab grass. Two mounds of dirt on the far right side, next to the trailer park, were used by kids on their dirt bikes. A place where the fence between the two developments had come down was a well-worn path.

Deeann was supposed to ask before she went to the trailer park. Juliet looked in the direction of the trailers, listening for the sound of children playing. She didn’t think much of the kids that lived there, mostly because she had heard them laughing at her. Deeann only ever left the immediate area to fetch groceries for Juliet, who, herself, left the house less and less. Her disability check went right in the bank, Deeann knew how to use the ATM, and the TV provided all the information and entertainment she needed.

On the far side of the trailer park was Casey’s General Store and, beyond that, the railroad tracks. The tracks crossed the highway at an angle, coming out of the trees and curving in to run along side the mill, which was wedged at the center of town between the tracks and the highway. Opposite the mill was what constituted Main Street. Originally it might have been three blocks of bustling action. Indeed, when the mill ran at full tilt, the three restaurants would fill at lunch with the sickly sweet smell of mill workers. Now the windows of what used to be sunny restaurants had been covered over to conceal the patrons of bars and pool halls, the only businesses in the area that prospered. It was in one of these dark bars that Juliet met the man that became Deeann's father.

The Auction - An Excerpt

It had stopped raining on their way back from the county clinic, but the water still flowed quickly in the gutter of the deserted main street. The sun that by now should have been bringing light to the quiet street remained obscured by clouds left from the storm that had passed during the night. It was early on a Saturday morning and their car was the only one parked at an angle between the stiff rows of buildings that composed the small town's center. The storefronts were all dark and cavernous, without light. Valerie sat in the car waiting for her husband who had gone into the Rexall Drug. He had not bothered to leave the keys in the car. She sat there in silence, without distraction. On the windshield in front of her the remains of a bug spread out across the glass. She began to cry again.

Her hand, cold and weak, pulled on the handle of the door, and it opened. Walking softly and calmly into the street, she was a solitary figure in what appeared a ghost town. She stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk without looking into the hollow True Value hardware store in front of her. She saw only the name of a concrete company pressed into each square of the sidewalk. Coming to the corner, she turned to the right, walking without purpose away from their car, the drug store, her husband.

Halfway down the block in front of her a yellow plastic lighted sign hung above the sidewalk. Donuts. At an angle in front of the donut shop a few cars were parked. Pick-up trucks belonging to farmers who were out early on a weekend morning, others who were without family and in need of company.

She stepped up quietly in front of the store, the rising sun beginning to make the damp air unpleasant. She stopped her walking and looked inside the store. The old men inside under the fluorescent lights drank coffee in styrofoam cups, put out cigarettes into tin ashtrays. They were talking, laughing and telling stories. Weathered faces turned red with excitement, grooved lines stretching with smiles. Thick framed glasses and gray hair cut close on the sides, aged shirts stretched through the middle.

Among the men, her father sat leaned across the pink table. Valerie recognized him there. He smiled and sat back into the fiberglass chair, taking a drag from his cigarette. He turned to the figure at the window, for only a moment, then turned back to his companions.

Riverside - an excerpt

A stomping through the hall, on the other side of the closed door, drew Abagail out of the book she was reading. She had been sitting in the window seat of her room, her eyes flowing quickly over the novel’s small typeface, but she was pulled out of that world.
At thirteen, Gail sensed the growing anger in the house, aware of its flowing in and out, like a fog which had now rolled in and filled up the halls and rooms of their house. On this day, she was the only one of the three children in the house, and thus she lacked the insulation that the presence of others could provide. With them there, shouting was less likely. Her parents might not even realize now that she was still in her room and not out in the afternoon playing with her brothers. She tossed the book down.
Standing, she brushed down her skirt, stood before the mirror, pushed back her glasses, and put her hand gently on the door knob. She twisted it as silently as possible and pulled the old door open. The hinges creaked, but only a gentle creaking, indistinguishable from the general noises the old house made. In the dim hall, light came from her parents’ room at one end, and at the other a diffuse light came from the ground floor below. She was stepping silently down the hall, listening for the sound of her steps and trying to ignore the voices of her parents coming from their bedroom, when she heard her mother’s laugh. What could have been a light laugh at first impression, Gail could tell was full of malice. She was laughing in such a way as to injure someone. She was familiar with that laugh, with the accompanying head tilted to the ceiling, the hands slapping legs. Gail used the shelter of the laugh to dart downstairs and through the screen door that smacked violently closed behind her.
Gail recalled a day that winter when she’d left the house in similar fashion, retreating from the sounds of an overturned table, and had somehow skipped the steps from the porch and snapped her ankle when she landed on the icy concrete of the front walk. Though she knew it was innocent enough, she was humiliated. Not only could she then not escape, she had to lie there on the walk and cry until someone came to help. Hobbling on her cast for the next six weeks convinced her of the unpleasant nature of the home.
Outside, the day was stifling and she immediately missed her window seat, her book. She stood in the shade of a large maple across the street from the house and debated what to do and where to go. Her brothers had gone up to Jackson Park, but she didn’t like the idea of being with them. Harry, in particular.

Short Story Excerpts Coming Your Way

I've been talking here about writing for some time, showing you the many rejection slips, but other than these quick blog posts, I've never really given you examples of my writing. So, I think it's time I did.

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting excerpts from my short stories. It'll just be the first couple hundred words. Enough to give you a taste and maybe leave you wanting a little more.

Romantic, Expatriate Paris

I received my first delivered edition of the Wall Street Journal this weekend (don't worry, I traded in frequent flier miles for the subscription) and beyond the usual business news, things I've learned I need to keep up of for work (you know, the real job) there was an excellent article titled Why the Expats Left Paris, by Dinaw Mengestu.


As the title indicates, Mengestu looks at how different Paris is today from the way it was different expatriate waves that took over it's cafes, when American intellectuals and artists could be found on every corner of the left bank. It is the notion of the American expatriates' Paris that has always made the city attractive. Beyond the city's own dandies and intellectuals, from Baudelaire to Sartre, it is the idea that Hemingway and Gertrude Stein are hanging out at one bar, while (in another time) Richard Wright and James Baldwin are at another.


Those times are gone. I went to Paris in 1999 in search of that Paris, looking for the heady cafe conversations, while chasing the history of my favorite Parisians. Even then, while the city remained romantic in my mind, the old Paris was gone. Walking the Champs Elysees should tell anyone that individual Paris, the city with it's own single identity is gone. The big American stores are here, with all the American vulgarity that the expats were looking to leave behind. The article points out that across Germain de Pres from Cafe de Flore and Deux Magots, an American Apparel store, with all its trashy clothes, has set up shop.

While the old expatriates' Paris is gone, the city remains romantic in the minds of many of us, include the article's author:

Unlike many of the writers and Americans who came here before, my reasons for being here are purely selfish and self-absorbed, with nothing and no one to run from. I used to say that I came to Paris because it was so quiet, in large part because at the time I could hardly speak the language. While today that may no longer be as completely true, the city still strikes me as quiet. There's no romantic ideal to be lived out here anymore -- no cafés, readings or events that can't be missed. What remain today are largely ghosts that are easy if not even comforting to live amongst. They had their Paris -- garrulous and crowded with the politics and culture of America -- and now finally, with no one else around, I can have mine.

Franchising Booksellers

I'm always thinking about ways to resurrect/save/reinvigorate the bookselling business. So, when I heard this week about Starbucks' trouble (closing 600 company-owned stores), I begin to wonder about their troubles and translating it to another retail industry


I am one of those hypocrites who complains about the big-box bookstores killing the industry while simultaneously shopping there myself. There's a Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet right now. There are maybe two main reasons people like us shop at these stories. First is their ubiquitousness. These stores are everywhere. Certainly much closer to me than my nearest (decent) independent bookstore. The second reason we frequent these sorts of places despite our moral qualms is that we know what to expect.

The retail franchise model supports these two explanations, but does something more. It puts the success or failure of the store in the hands of the franchisee. This is why I think it could succeed as new model for bookselling.

The corporate office in the franchise provides branding, which may be the most important element of what they do, but they also offer support. Support is much different than mandates. I'm not sure how much liberty the buyer at the local Borders has, but I'm relatively certain the books they chose to promote, what ends up on the stores displays, in their windows, are directed from some corporate office far, far away. An independent owner/operator, though, would have freedom to respond to his/her individual market, absent of corporate mandates.

Now, since the time my mind crossed this possibility, I've been imagining many different scenarios, many different ways the relationship between franchiser and franchisee could work. I just want to put the thought out there. I know little about the industry in detail, and my knowledge of the franchise set-up comes from my time as a manager at a pizza delivery chain. So, I'm no expert, but maybe someone out there knows more and could help build the business case--or, tell me I'm just wrong.

Happy 4th

Or as we sang last night over a red, white, and blue cupcake with two candles burning in it, "Happy birthday dear America...."