Talking about reading with Will put me in mind of this exquisite poem by Diane Swan that I ran across a year or so ago on Kristin Cashore's blog . I was transfixed reading it for the first time. And I think of it, the lines running hauntingly and beautifully through my head, all the time now. *** Soup and Bread by Diane Swan Christopher's girlfriend has a green cockatiel and he tells the family at dinner that cuttlebone-- what the bird sharpens its beak on-- comes from a squid. I am startled. He knows more than I have told him. One lunchtime years ago he called me an instructicon and often I did talk as if my children were tall glass vases formed to contain my twigs of trivia, long branches of perennial wisdom. What I wanted, though I didn't know it then, was that clean clothes, knowledge, bread, everything good would come to them through me. Now they are walking ahead toward the theater, two young...