Assorted Prose (2012)
“Do civilized people believe otherwise? When Harriet Pick, for instance, marries Kenneth Shovel in Oklahoma City, papers in Toronto and Miami carry the news, and Coronet and Time find space in one of their jocular departments, and Mr. and Mrs. Shovel must begin to wonder if in truth they are, as they seem to each other, flesh and blood, and not a pair of implements.
My own marriage was bothered by a verbal coincidence, one so small I thought it would slip by unnoticed. My wife’s maiden name was ...Pennington, and the Updikes came, two generations back, from Pennington, New Jersey. Our farm there was sold, and fragments of the family settled variously in Connecticut, Kansas, Florida, and Trenton—a typical enough episode in the American dispersal.* My grandfather went to Trenton; my father, the year I was born, came to live in Pennsylvania. All Updikes of my father’s generation had a special feeling about the town of Pennington: it was the family Paradise out of whose inheritance they had been cheated.MoreLess
My own marriage was bothered by a verbal coincidence, one so small I thought it would slip by unnoticed. My wife’s maiden name was ...Pennington, and the Updikes came, two generations back, from Pennington, New Jersey. Our farm there was sold, and fragments of the family settled variously in Connecticut, Kansas, Florida, and Trenton—a typical enough episode in the American dispersal.* My grandfather went to Trenton; my father, the year I was born, came to live in Pennsylvania. All Updikes of my father’s generation had a special feeling about the town of Pennington: it was the family Paradise out of whose inheritance they had been cheated.MoreLess
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