That moment when you’re conversing with a friend over lunch in a restaurant close to your office and you recognize the man who has just walked in as one of the many semi-attractive frat guys who used to mill around the cafeteria in college, and he recognizes you too (you can tell because he looks at you a little too long), but neither of you says anything because neither of you ever knew each other’s name.  And if you ever did, you’ve forgotten it by now.

That moment when you’re reading a book based in 1930’s London and enjoying the sly wit of the language until you come to a racist simile. (p. 48, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, (c) 1938)

Why that word as a descriptor instead of something else? And in such a throwaway manner? It came at me from left field and disrupted the flow of my reading.  I seriously re-read the sentence a couple times to make sure that I hadn’t read wrong.

Now I’m wary of what I’ll find in the rest of the book…