There was surely some better word than do,” but Annie couldn't, for the moment, think of it.
“Conduct,” Ian suggested in his bigbrotherly way, though with a touch of tongue-in-cheek. Would that make him a conductor, then, Annie thought, not a minister? And she imagined this man they were about to meet turning up at the funeral with a baton or with one of those strap-on machines with which bus conductors used to issue tickets.
Both ideas strangely pleased her, though she didn’t share them with Ian. Sitting beside him while he drove, she reached out and touched his shoulder, just a light scuffing with her knuckles. Tan almost flinched.
For Annie, one of the effects of losing her father was that she also lost words. They suddenly went missing. Even the words that did present themselves could seem odd and unreliable. Minister,” for example, was an odd word.
Their meeting with the minister was itself about words, since the main purpose of it was to tell the minister things about their father so that the minister, in his address at the funeral, could, in turn, say things about him. This, they both felt, was essentially, as Ian had put it, a scam.” The minister had never known their father, and they now had to prime this man, whom they themselves didn’t know, so that he could speak about their father as if he'd been a bosom pal. So a better word than minister,” Annie thought, might be impostor.” Obviously, it was not a better word. This thing, the funeral of their father, would be a pretense. Yet they had to pretend that it wasnt a pretense. Was there a word for that?
In any case, their meeting with the minister posed a basic difficulty: what to tell him about their father? They were already coping with the greatest of difficulties: their father had died. And this difficulty had confronted them with an equally great difficulty, which they hadn't exactly discussed
Denne historien er fra November 21, 2022-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra November 21, 2022-utgaven av The New Yorker.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
