Word: pedaling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crouching militiaman. He yells to his colleagues hidden in the trees that a vehicle is about to brave the 50-yard stretch exposed to Christian snipers, and they prepare to lay down covering fire if necessary. Then the militiaman shouts, "One, two, three, go!" The traveler slams the gas pedal to the floor. Sometimes the car makes it to the other side unscathed, sometimes...
...turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind by their beer cans or cocktail glasses...
...aware that one should not bother a parent, even the wife of a doctor, with complaints of the body. But then, you are no ordinary mother. Who else would write to her 18-year-old son, "Adieu, my darling, I kiss you tenderly with a pedal point to be sustained until the next kiss"? Small wonder that I could not bear to be parted from you, and that your death drove me to withdrawal from society and into the winding passages of Time, Memory...
...easy being Norman Mailer. What other writer would have to soft-pedal a birthday? He braces for the approach of his publication dates, having a pretty fair idea of how the critical articles in response will be organized: "The standard joke of this household is, 'On what page do they get to the review [see box]?' In other words, the life always comes first...
...three months after the seizures. During this period he sometimes imagined that he was still practicing dentistry in Seattle; at other times he was lucid enough to complain, "My mind is shot." But Clark improved. By the end of February his confusion had disappeared, and he was able to pedal a stationary bicycle for a few minutes at a time. Only his lungs, weakened by years of poor circulation, slowed his recovery...