Endless Knots

Nancy White on the necessity (or not) of face-to-face

The great comments on the "Is face-to-face necessary?" post continue to roll in. This one from Nancy White is so telling that I thought you'd want to see it.

Hey Jessica

I share your experience of people wanting to have F2F trainings for online facilitation, etc. If it is not AT LEAST a blend of F2F and online, I won't do it anymore.

I think the comments above surface the complexity of the question. Context matters - and contexts are diverse.

I love working with people who simply CAN'T be together, and with that motivation, amazing things are possible, including functioning, trust-ful teams. I've had situations where we had plenty of F2F, process support, etc and the teams failed. I bet they would have failed if they were all F2F because they were missing the bits that any team needs to succeed, including enough shared purpose, intention, attention and in most cases, enough slack from their "vertical" responsibilities to attend to the "horizontal" responsibilities of cross organizational teams.

Anyway, I'm wandering.

My data points? If a team is to primarily function at a distance and there are no extenuating situations (i.e. ZERO tech skills, language or whatever) that starting online FIRST is actually a success strategy.

People "test" their "online antennae" around relationship and trust building. They do small interrelated tasks to understand working styles. Then, IF THEY CAN, come together F2F to validate their online experience. They go "yeah this works, and no, we need to tweak that." They consider their online skills not as theory, but as practice.

These groups go online again faster and stay together easier than groups who start F2F, reaffirm all they KNOW about F2F then flounder online.

Hey, I'm jet lagged. Enough rambling but sufficient to say, I'm with ya, sistah!

Another of the networking greats passes on: Seymour Sarason

Back when we were first writing about networks, we received a letter (in the mail, that long ago), written on beautiful stationery. It was from Elizabeth M. Lorentz, who said that while she liked our book, we'd missed a very important source of information: the books she'd written with Seymour Sarason (who died on Jan. 28 in New Haven). She went on to point out that we'd failed to recognize a critical role in networks, that of the coordinator, again a function that she and Sarason had identified.

Shame on us. We'd missed their work entirely. In fact, we'd never heard of either of them until the letter came, but, once it did, a friendship was born with Elizabeth that lasted until she died about ten years ago.

I could (and eventually will) write for pages about Elizabeth, her remarkable life, and what turned out to be an important friendship. Her father was Eugene Meyer, first head of the World Bank, but that was only later in his life, after many other positions, including chairing the Federal Reserve Bank, and buying, at auction, The Washington Post, which Elizabeth's younger sister, Katharine Graham, would eventually run. The world passed through the doors of the Meyer home and, during the fifteen years of our friendship, I heard many stories about people whom I only knew from reading--Brancusi, Steichen, Gershwin, to name a few. The most important to our work was Seymour.

The Times obit that I linked to in the first paragraph reviews Seymour's remarkable contribution to psychology, which acknowledges the role of community in shaping people. I'd never met Seymour face-to-face until Elizabeth died and her sister organized a memorial service in New York. At the luncheon following, I was seated between Seymour and Mrs. Graham. (Somehow he was instantly Seymour but I couldn't think of her as Kay.)

He was warm and funny, knew our work, and wanted me to come visit him in Connecticut. You no doubt have a list of such trips yourself, ones that you really want to make but never can make happen, say, next Tuesday. I'm so grateful that I did make the time, many times over, to see Elizabeth and get to know her.

Seymour's and Elizabeth's work together, which began after she was well into her fifties, called out "The Challenge of the Resource Exchange Network," the title of one of their books. (Seymour wrote dozens, by the way.)

One of its central tenets lies close to the heart of all of us interested in networks: that we have a great deal to offer one another but we have to reach outside the narrow bounds of the organizations we serve in order to realize it--and to manifest what cross-boundary communication and sharing really make possible. Coordinators, back to that first letter from Elizabeth, are the people who can make this happen.

As I'm madly trying to find some passages that describe what Elizabeth and Seymour were talking about, I've put my fingers on a few pages in The Age of the Network on their work. Will post that too.

Meanwhile, a deep bow to the phenomenal body of work that you produced, Seymour, which we all need to study more closely.

And a huge public note to self: Stop delaying all those trips.

Uh-oh

Does anyone read over the scripts of the news broadcasters these days? Last night, Lester Holt (NBC News), verbatim: "The federal government will be closed today." Really? He didn't say this but..."The U.S. is closed. Try again later."

Start your week right with "Baby Dancer"

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 8

Page 8, "The Persuasion"

I didn’t move. I remember wondering if I should stand but couldn’t.

And I remember rerunning in detail what had just happened, numbering each piece, the non-compliant encyclopedia, the Pssst, the bench, the conversation with the spirit, a kind of reasonable, if insistent, one.

That I liked her, liked her feist, her sheer pluck at showing up more than a century after she’d died.

And then I remember another sizzle, a filmy light, a sketchy outline filling in like a photo bathing in developer, a garnet dress (I wanted one), high black-laced boots (those, too) coming into view beneath her skirt, a knot of curls turning sienna, and there she was, full, beside me again, bow at the bodice, hands clasped over the book in her lap just like the drawing, except this time with a sprig of dark-cherry heliotrope behind her right ear.

Of all that I will say, there is one fundamental reality whose truth drives our connection. My work was taken from me before it had been seen to completion. I know, I know.

She waved her hand as if to prevent my stating the obvious.

People say, at least many have said, that Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the most influential treatise on Woman of all time. Untrue, Mariana. They never understood it. That hastily written screed was but the introduction to the world I saw coming and it was hardly just about Woman. I never had the opportunity to complete my thinking. I died just at the start of the Industrial Revolution and humanity has transformed, nay, I'll say it, evolved through many eras since-Man and Woman.

I don’t know exactly what she said next. I don't remember getting up, leaving the garden, or sitting down again at the desk but I do remember grabbing the pencil and watching it vibrate over the notebook. Next another sizzle, the light brightening, and watching my hand, as if it were not attached to me, lightspeeding across the page, scrawling unsteady letters and squiggly underlines:

Woman in the 21st Century

Valdis Krebs on face-to-face

Priceless. Below Valdis, one of the originals in social network analysis, comments on whether face-to-face is necessary. Had to elevate it:

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, then a day F2F is worth a 1000 emails/tweets.

Margalit Fox on Tomas Eloy Martinez

Fox, mentioned below, has a thorough bio of Tomas in her obit, including some extraordinary moments in his life that I remember his talking about. Poignant.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 7

Page 7, "The Persuasion"

Eerie as this sounds, I wasn’t frightened. It was all transpiring too quickly, just beyond the click of real time, faster than I could stand apart and observe. Funny, then, that I can remember the conversation, if you can call it that, verbatim.

Mariana, there is much that I must impart to you but let us start at the destination. As you just read in that pitiful summary of my biography, pitiful, I perished tragically, with my husband and our little son, my only child, which they failed to note, off the coast of Fire Island.

I’d noticed the reference to Fire Island, where Tonin’s parents had their summer house.

Henry came to find my body at the Lighthouse but it never washed ashore. I died too young.

“Who’s Henry?” Until that moment I had said nothing but, even as I write this years later, I have no idea whether I said these words, whether I thought them, or whether I was hallucinating the whole thing.

Henry Thaw’-row. She punched her voice into the first syllable then, poof, she sizzled, making the sound of the radio dial twirled just beyond the station’s band. Then began her long fade, as she grew ever less visible, until there was nothing next to me but air and all I could hear was the librarian’s voice from way inside the building. “There’s far too little emphasis in our textbooks on...”

Is face-to-face necessary?

“I am writing to you this evening with what seems to me to be a slightly paradoxical request,” the email began. “I am looking for a presenter (live and in person) on the topic of Virtual Teams.”

He was writing from Europe, where the event would take place, with colleagues and clients joining from across North America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia. I was impressed with the emailer's self-awareness.

We’ve received speaking queries where people don’t appear to notice that a virtual teams event might by rights take place virtually. There is a certain symmetry, a coherence of the message, that is hard to miss. Some do.

So this post, roiling around for some months, as the plethora—of books, articles, “studies” (I use quotes because some of them are of questionable provenance), and off-the-top-of-the-head posts on how to ensure virtual team success—proliferates.

A striking one came last year, a request to write another book foreword. It turned out to be a solid manuscript, based on sturdy research, and we ended up writing it without hesitation.

But I remain troubled by its—and the rest of these formulas’—Rxes for virtual team troubles: first meet face-to-face.

If that’s the primary requirement, rarely put forth with any theatre-of-the-absurb quips, then many virtual teams are sunk from the outset.

Unstated in the always-begin-in-person requirement is that otherwise people cannot learn to trust one another, that that only happens when you can watch how others fondle their coffee cups, pick at their cuticles, make faces (voluntarily or otherwise), or hang around a bar together.

Face-to-face, particularly for global and cross-country teams, is just not practical for everyone who has to work together—for example, flying across the US or taking the train from Chile to Venezuela or helicoptering across the Hindu-Kush.

I feel almost silly listing the reasons: it’s expensive; it’s time-consuming; it’s not particularly green; and, most important, there is no incontrovertible proof that it guarantees superior results. My bold assertion: It's an opinion, not a fact, that when teams meet face-to-face initially they always produce better, faster, and cheaper.

The problem in proving the opposite is that it's hard to imagine any organization actually performing this experiment, especially given the prevailing business climate. Would a thoughtful leader pay for the proof: give the same project to two teams—complex ones that require the best minds—funding one to meet first in person, the other to start virtually?

We need a number of well-designed studies that examine teams of similar diversity with comparably complex remits and roughly analogous resources, budgets, and schedules.

My hunch—based on our experience studying teams that never meet face-to-face—is that beginning in person may be desirable but it is not necessary.

It’s nice. It’s fun. It may even get some friendships off the ground more quickly.

But it also may create cliques that wouldn’t otherwise form; instill some prejudices that come about in the split-second when people first encounter one another; eliminate the possibility of serendipity that often comes about in the online environment; and, need I add, stress people out because travel is now so appealing.

Meeting face-to-face doesn’t guarantee success. Think of some of your own experiences where your team only met in person. All perfect, right?

I love being with people. There’s no substitute but …

Do we absolutely need to have our kick-off meetings shoulder-to-shoulder?

Should the “experts” continue drumming that we have to begin that way to be successful?

Thoughts?

 

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 6

Page 6, "The Persuasion"

I blinked. I shut my eyes and opened them. I did this faster. And slower. I inhaled. I exhaled. I coughed. I swallowed. I choked a little. I made more involuntary noises. I watched the hair on my arm rise—and I became very cold.

The woman, the Sarah Margaret Fuller whose life I’d just taken notes on, stood not five feet away, motioning to follow her. But just as I had not deliberately turned to the page where I’d read about her, I did not voluntarily rise from the chair and follow her into the garden.

She stood beside a granite bench and smoothed her hand along the back of her skirt so as not to muss it, sitting. Here. She patted the bench.

Mariana, we have met before. May I call your attention to as recently as yesterday, for instance, at the café when a woman of your generation made a penetrating, might I say, illuminating, comment about the condition of man? Her voice was strained and starchy, the phony English accent old American actors used to sound sophisticated.

I did remember that person in the café whom she mentioned—and then I couldn’t recall her at all. Every word was audible but I didn’t think she was actually making any sound. I could see what she was saying in my head, as if she were writing on the walls of my mind in flourescent ink or in the crevices of my brain or right onto my eyeballs...I wasn’t even certain where.

 

And now from the inventor of crash blossoms, "snailpapers"

Further to my "Crash blossoms" post, I received this comment below from Dan Bloom, inventor of the meme, a comment that is just so delicious that I've elevated it to its own post. Now he's invented "Snailpaper," which takes about a quarter of a second to figure out. Terrific. Go, Dan!

As the goofy guy who coined Crash blossoms , and i am named BLOOM, a blooming idiot if ever there was one, here's my latest coinage and please blog on this too it is MORE important than crash blossoms and i was JOKING about the term and it took OFF, i have no idea why.... DAN BLOOM in Taiwan...I wrote THE SNAILPAPER STATEMENT today, and here's a preview:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that while the Digital Age is upon us fast and furious, the print newspaper -- hereafter dubbed the "snailpaper" -- shall persevere as a good daily read, a fascinating look at the world around us and a valuable tool for understanding oped pundits and above the fold headlines. Sure, the dear snailpaper will also be seen as a useful tool

for wrapping fish at the Fulton Fish Market or lining the bird cage in the den, but all kidding aside -- har! har! -- the daily snailpaper can hold its head high and be certain of its place in the culture. While news migrates in pixels and bytes to the Internet at an exponential rate, piling breaking story upon breaking story and turning everyone and his mother into a 24/7 news freak and RSS aggregator, the plodding snailpaper will nevertheless remain the bedrock of analysis and insight, from sea to shining sea, delivered at a snail's pace, yes, read at a snail's pace, yes, and absorbed, word for word -- on glorius printed paper! white newsprint reflecting inked letters! -- at a snail's pace, yes, as long as the Republic of Letters shall live."

Full blast here:

http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/02/snailpaper-statement-mini-version-by.html

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 5

Page 5, "The Persuasion"

I put my hand beside the thick ply of pages flopped over to the right. I had to read up on the brave soldier, I had to make a timeline of Soldier Samson’s life, and, as I was thinking these very rational things, I noticed my hand scrawling mad notes in my new red notebook:

Sarah Margaret Fuller—1810-50: Critic, j’list, soc refrmr, b. 05/23/1810, Cmbrdgp’t, Mass, rig-ously educ’d by fathr, Timothy, US cong’man “2 blve that womn = of mn;” frnds w/lit, art, & pol ldrs, US & Eur; edtr, princ wrtr, The Dial (“Trans’dntal M’ment”); auth, Summer on the Lakes, Convos w/Goethe, Gunderode, Papers on Lit & Art, and Wom in the Ninet’th Cent; col’mnst, NY Dly Trib; 1st Amer wom frgn corresp; eyewit to Rom Revol, 1848; d. 07/19/1850, w/husb, Ct Giovanni Ossoli, & son, Angelo Eugene, return’g to Amer; ship broke up, storm, 150’ off Fire Isle.

I wrote Sarah Margaret Fuller again, underlined her last name twice, turned the journal to a clean page, put both hands on the edge of the encyclopedia, and easily opened it to Soldier Samson’s entry.

Yes. The woman I was researching for my essay, the woman who broke ranks with her gender to defend her country. D-e-b-o-r—I’d gotten that far in writing her name when I heard something. Pssst. Pssst. Where was it coming from? Pssst. Psssssst. I traced my eyes around the room. Down the long wall of floor-to-ceiling books, along the open shelves of periodicals in the back, along the opposite bank of study carrels, and...there it was. She was. At the glass door. By the library garden. Waving. Sort of smiling. Shooing me toward her. The woman near the end of the Fs. Pssst.

 

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 4

Page 4, "The Persuasion"

“There’s far too little in our textbooks about the role women played in the American Revolution.” The woman at the Reference Desk was reading Liberating Women’s History, which she put aside when I approached to explain my project. “Begin with the Encyclopedia of American Women, over there.” She pointed to a thick volume on a mahogany stand of its own. “You can take it to your desk.” She printed three names in the ornate style of my boarding school friends. “But first. Deborah Samson.” She snapped a stiff right hand to her eyebrow. “The brave soldier who fought the British in 1778. As a man.” We both smiled the way women do when they’re proud of their own. “Start with her.”

I lugged the encyclopedia, all one thousand four hundred and sixty-two pages of it, to a desk, took a sharp pencil from the box, opened the journal, and wrote the date inside the front cover. I grabbed the encyclopedia at its belly and flipped to the left, toward the Ss. But the pages fanned out of my hand and it opened to the Fs. I tried again, with fewer pages in my hand. Fs again.  I grabbed with both hands but the pages slipped from my grasp until the book lay flat near the end of the Fs.

There, on the left page, was the drawing of a woman. Dark hair parted in the middle, some up and knotted in the back, some hanging in curls below her shoulders, fingers of both hands barely touching, a book in her lap. Her dress was a rich satin, V-neck collar trimmed in lace, a bow at the bodice, fitted, and with a lush full skirt. The sleeves were long and loose, cuffed in fluffy organza. Large sad round eyes, something, something almost familiar but not quite ... and I had work to do.

Timberland's Jeff Swartz on Haiti: "My heart still has not come back"

Jeff Swartz, Timberland CEO, is one of those who dropped everything to go and help. His report is wrenching, inspiring, frustrating...and heart-opening. Posted to Paul Levy's blog here as "Bearing Witness to Haiti." Thank you, Jeff.

And here's the paragraph whence the title of this post. (There are so many stunning lines in Jeff's piece that I've already changed the title twice.):

We went back to handing out the food. The crush didn’t go away, but the fear of a bad scene did. I’m still kinda pinned against the truck; from under the truck, a little brown hand reaches out and grabs my cargo calf. I look down, and there is a little hand clutching my leg. Can’t see the child — he or she has crawled through the densest crush of people I’ve ever seen, wriggled under the truck, and grabbed me — signaling, "I beat the line, now give me a meal." I slipped one down to the hand; the hand grabbed it and vanished. My heart still has not come back — a child, figuring out how to get a meal.

Tomas Eloy Martinez...

...has died. The Argentine journalist, who for a number of years headed the Latin American studies department at Rutgers, was also a novelist whose books played with reality, Santa Evita perhaps the emblem of the genre. What genre, I'm not certain, but Tomas did it masterfully. The story of an investigative reporter on the hunt to find Eva Peron's body, the book is carefully footnoted to the point that it's nearly impossible to distinguish what came out of the author's mind and what the reader can actually google.

I have two photos of Tomas, neither very good, taken at book club at our house in 2006. The backstory: as previously reported, I often take the train back and forth to New York. As some measure of my particular karma, I often meet a writer on that journey. As karmas go, this is a good one.

But sometimes I'm very tired on these trips and don't want to talk to anyone at all. Such was the case early one Sunday evening in 2006 when I was a little late getting on the train. There were only a few seats available and I chose the one where I anticipated the least interaction--a couple sitting opposite each other, both with their laptops running. I sat down next to the woman (Gabriela Esquivada, far right in photo), we exchanged smiles, and I settled in for a rest.

A few minutes later, Gabriela asked if she could get by, then offered to get me a coffee for disturbing me...and we were off and running. She introduced me to her husband, who was deep in concentration, watching some sort of thriller, as I recall...and then she explained who he was, one of the great Latin American writers, and soon all of us were talking. (It was from Tomas that I later learned that Carlos Fuentes loves bluefish, a phrase that will eventually make it into an essay about such train encounters, drafted so far only in my head.)

But why were they coming to Boston? Tomas turned the right side of his head toward me, a very large and red scar searing down the side, just behind his ear. Glioblastoma, he said, and he was being treated here in Boston.

We struck up a friendship and a month or so later, Tomas and Gabriela, also an Argentine journalist and editor, came to book club. I wrote a note about the evening for my friends on Zoetrope (see below). About two years ago, we lost touch. I was sad to see the news this morning but amazed that he lived for so long with this terrible disease.

From my notes:

Tomas Eloy Martinez came to our book club last night to discuss Santa Evita. So far, Tomas has written seven novels, I believe, and a whole lot of journalism down the years, but has not had as much exposure in the US as abroad, at 71 not as familiar as other Lat American writers, Carlos Fuentes, for example, whom he’s known since he was 18 (Fuentes is 10 years older).  One of Tomas’s books, unpublished in the US, The Flight of the Queen has sold 500k sales globally, many translations, best foreign book in China (dunno year), and on. I found this interview with him in Three Monkeys Online and it squares with what I’ve been learning from him, worth reading.

Tomas and Gabriela Esquivada-Martinez, his wife, have been here in Boston for past couple of months where Tomas is being treated for brain tumor. I met them in early March on the train from NY to Boston ten days after his surgery; they were traveling to Boston from their home in Highland Park, NJ, where he’s been heading Lat Amer studies dept at Rutgers. Mission: his first round of chemo and radiation. When I picked them up last night, I expected him to look haggard and ill. He looks great. His incision is healing and he spoke well and clearly for many hours.

Tomas focused on the line between fiction and fact, blurry, saying that the woman writing the intro to the anthology of his work being pub’d in Venezuela (hope I’ve got this right) finds the theme of his work to be “doubt.” I agree, caveat being that I’ve only read one of his books…but it is impossible to know, reading it, whether it is fact or fiction. How could this be a novel, I kept asking myself, but Tomas told us last night that only the last three pages are true. He entered the “black hole” of nine missing months in Eva Peron’s history and from it spun this book. Very dark, no redeeming characters, except perhaps the “I” who appears late in the book, relatively speaking, and is never fully revealed.

My book club has been meeting for 15 or so years, monthly, 190 books to date, primarily classics. This evening was in its own category and I encourage everyone to read Tomas’s work.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 3

Page 3, "The Persuasion"

Five minutes and $20 of Tonin’s money lighter, I was back in the Fire Engine, taking a left on Church, a right on Brattle.

Crimson azalea, white lilac, and pink bleeding hearts stood centurion along the cobblestone walk. I assembled the sentence as I parked on Garden Street. Centurion or should it be sentry? Messenger bag over my shoulder, I dropped three hours’ worth of dimes in the meter, and walked through the Radcliffe gates. Maybe guard? Two singulars and a plural? I followed the signs to the library. Maybe not stood. No verb. I don’t need a verb. Or maybe, oh, there’s the library ... at which point ankle twisted, knee buckled, palm scraped, ouch, elbow banged, woman down.

I was startled when a person I hadn’t noticed before slipped her hand under my arm. “A fine studio for the soul sculptor, this Schlesinger Library for the History of Women.” She looped the messenger bag back on my shoulder and hiked me up. “You’ll find the librarian to be of inestimable assistance and particular skill.” Was this how women spoke at Radcliffe? Soul sculptor?  I noticed her silk jacket and long dress, deep red with iridescent crimson threads, wondered if she were going to the opera that night, and if so why was she here? I must have had a puzzled look because she tilted her head to the side as if considering how to respond. But I hadn’t said anything so I quickly thanked her, smiled, and rushed inside.

"Computers, eReaders, and cell phones don’t grow on trees"

How green is your eReader/Kindle/iPad (not that anyone has one yet)? Common sense suggests that digital-anything is greener than the analog device it's replacing. "Which is Greener: Paper or Digital? The Answer May Surprise You" gives a bit of pause, right up there with the finding that Google searches are, yup, not without environmental impact.

One quote from the article worth thinking about:

“Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver, and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently, there was little, if any, voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle ‘backstory’ of digital media.”

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 2

Page 2, "The Persuasion"

“Wallet, MJ. I need my wallet.” He grabbed it from the bureau, took out a ten, then a twenty, rolled across the bed, and tucked the small fortune for those days in my pocket. “Get a nice leather notebook too.” He pinched my tush and when I turned back to face him, he drew his eyebrows tight, puckered a lip, I did the same, and we kissed. “M et T on dit au revoir,” he said.

I said I’d see him by five and jumped into Fire Engine #23, headed for Cambridge.

Parking in The Square was no problem back then. I pulled onto the curb in the alley by The Coop. The black paint of the ten-foot peace symbol, an aging merit badge from The Sixties, was separating from the brick. A skinny girl on the curb, fifteen at most—hair matted, a hole in her sneaker, and, despite the Spring warmth, wearing three jackets—held up a paper cup. I pulled Tonin’s ten out of my pocket and pressed it into her hand.

The pencils weren’t where they’d been the last time we’d been there. Half the stationery department now housed calculators, which had pushed aside the adding machines. I knew Tonin wanted a calculator and thought I should take a look, but then I remembered why I was there.

Crash blossoms

Don't read this while drinking anything or you'll have a mess on your hands/screen. Crash blossoms happen when we mistake nouns for verbs and v/v, taken from this perfect example: "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms." Well done, Ben Zimmer of NY Times.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 1

Perhaps

“Stay here.” He circled a soft handcuff around my wrist with his finger and thumb, tightening it as I threw back the covers. “Just a few more minutes. Here.” Tonin tapped the mattress, pulled the quilt around my waist, drew me toward him. He was half-sitting up, reading The Globe, pillows against the headboard. “You’ll like this. Richardson’s going after Nixon.”

“Good. You read about the Republicans.” I tossed The Times onto his lap, withdrawing early from the morning ritual: while I stayed in bed to write before the dreams wore off, he made the coffee and carried it back with the papers on Babi’s silver tray. We sipped and read and “practiced our a.m. activities” (Tonin’s term). Not today. He grumbled while I pulled on my jeans, laced up my boots.

“Gotta run, Tonie. Pencils. I need pencils.”

--From "The Persuasion"