She spelled my mother’s name Karin, though it is and has always been Karen with an ‘e.’ I assumed all old people wrote illegibly and got away with spelling people’s names wrong. They had lived a long time. They’d earned the right to spell however they liked, and never had to study words like ‘February’ for spelling tests, yet you still had to write them thank-you notes for every little thing they sent you. I imagined that, once you reached 65 or so, you could just write Feb. or Febuary and no one would dare mention it. You aged out of spelling, grammar, and editing.
from ‘Hot Dish,’ an annotated recipe, published at http://www.thenormalschool.com/PDFs/spies_recipe_tns2.pdf
Notes