We’re lying side by side, reading. A book for him, a screen for me.

Me: I want a cupcake.

Him: What? Where’d that come from?

Me: This post I’m reading. See?

I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain old letters of the alphabet.

Me: I think cupcake is one of my ten favorite words.

Him: Hmm. You know, I don’t really like cupcakes.

Pause.

Me: That’s all right, I’ll have yours.

Wonderboy: My hearing aids aren’t working.

Me: Oh, are your batteries dead?

Wonderboy: Huh?

Me: Do you need new batteries?

Wonderboy: What?

Me: Come here, let me check your hearing aids.

Wonderboy: I think my batteries got dead.

(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate in one hand and a giant slice of pizza in the other. Priorities.)

Just one week ago, Jack was in his prime. Ruddy, round-cheeked, he had a cheerful grin for all the world.

Then he went out one night and got lit up.

Now, sad to say, that once sprightly youth has aged before his time. He spends his days on the porch, cantankerously frowning at passersby.

Let this be a lesson to you, children.

“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”

—from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp

The esteemed and sleek-whiskered Mouse Chairwoman is quoting from “Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, one of the English “Cavalier poets,” those  dashing, witty, and sensitive 17th-century Carpe Diem fellows who came out in support ...

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