Word: sparing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then my 17-year-old brother got on the phone. "Why don't you just put the spare on?" It hadn't really occurred to me yet. "If you call triple-A for this you're lame." He concluded, and then handed the phone back...
...went to the trunk and found the spare, jack and that wrench thingy that can double as a murder weapon in times of emergency. I had learned how to do this all a while back, but apart from the fact that the jack goes somewhere under the car and is somehow made to lift the car up, I didn't remember much. So I consulted the owner's manual, which is of course written, or rather drawn, in such a way that, whenever possible, coherent sentences are substituted with a shoddy drawing...
...wasn't until this point that I realized that the spare was closer in size to Harvard dining hall bagels than to the other tires. It looked like it belonged on a bike....a very small bike. What could I do? I put the spare on mounting, then searched around in the gravel for the bolts that I hadn't been smart enough to put somewhere safe, and finally I had tightened all of the bolts again. I wound down the jack, and packed everything back into the trunk, including, (for sentimental value,) the shreds of rubber...
...pages of spare description at the outset of the somewhat old-fashioned romantic adventure Charlotte Gray (Random House; 399 pages; $24.95), novelist Sebastian Faulks makes a promise that somewhat old-fashioned readers expect and understand. The brief opening scene takes a Spitfire pilot over Nazi-occupied France on a lone mission and brings him back to his British home field, his fragile plane's tail controls damaged by antiaircraft fire. He makes a ragged landing and climbs out of the cockpit, shaking. A mechanic asks, "How was it, Greg?" He answers, "It was cold...
...much is made of the complexities of modern motherhood that you wonder: In the past, did people actually have kids, and raise them competently? Grace Santos (Rosie Perez), a new mother and producer of an a.m. TV show, asks herself this question in the spare moments when she's not auditioning for a nervous breakdown. The film rings true to the desperations that pile on any frazzled working mom; but the tone is wearying, and the film looks peaked, ratty, as if it had been up all night in a bad mood. Perez, a born beguiler, has little chance...