Making Toast Page 11

  “Going to snow,” he says.

  “Looks like it, Bubs. Would you like a banana this morning?” I ask him.

  “Toast,” he says. “Real toast.”

  “Real toast it is.”

  He goes to the table and kneels on his chair. I bring him a sliced banana and toast, along with my own toast and coffee. We eat.

  acknowledgments

  Making Toast first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker, in December 2008. I am grateful to Dorothy Wickenden and Andrea Thompson of the magazine, and especially to its editor, David Remnick, who gave me invaluable advice. My thanks as well to Dan Halpern, as good a friend as an editor, which is saying something.

  About the Author

  ROGER ROSENBLATT’s essays for Time magazine and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy. He is the author of six Off-Broadway plays and thirteen books, including the national bestseller Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two satirical novels, Beet and Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. In 2008 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University.

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  also by roger rosenblatt

  BEET

  LAPHAM RISING

  Copyright

  MAKING TOAST. Copyright © 2010 by Roger Rosenblatt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-196987-4

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