As I no longer have The New York Times delivered to the house, if I want it, I have to purchase it at a newsstand. This week, for example, I missed Monday's edition -- too busy. But on Sunday evening, as the coals were getting hot, I jumped on the bike and spun around the corner to Starbucks to pick one up.

I was rewarded with two beautiful articles in the Sunday magazine. First there were Joan Didion's exquisite reflections on death and mourning: "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it." She does her best to show it to us.

Then Neal Pollack writes about the anticipation of joy -- the days preparing to become a father:

Later, in a reasonably accurate preview of what ideal fatherhood is actually like, I chased my 3-year-old nephew around the pool, my arms in the air, saying, "Rawwwrrrr!" while he shrieked to his daddy not to let the monster get him. If you can get past the initial infant-as-vegetable stage, suddenly fatherhood becomes a permanent role-play in which you are either the monster or the monster's victim. Sometimes you are also a bear or a lion or a dinosaur, but the principle of the chase remains the same. If, like me, you have no actual skills to teach your children other than ranting at the news, you can at least come up with new ways to scare the hell out of them.