"All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is a death, or triumph; there has been a meeting and a change."

--Mary Renault

"When I was in college I spent a summer with my sister on a cow farm in rural Virginia. My sister was taking pre-med classes at the University of Virginia, and she had a friend who I ended up calling "Dave the Med Student". Isn't it funny where we all are now? My sister has four kids and is living in Siberia. Dave is a successful doctor in Virginia and has (from what I hear) a whisky room with a velvet Elvis collection. And of course I am in law school, which seems equally absurd to all my friends who knew me when I was living in a trailer in Gordonsville that summer with my sister.

Dave had a story that I've always remembered, about a patient on the oncology ward where Dave was assigned to do rounds. The story about the patient, Yamo, was pretty blunt and, well, clinical: "I went in one day and Yamo's belly was full of fluid. The next day I went in and Yamo was yellow from the jaundice...." My sister, the clinical-wannabe, was eating up Yamo's deterioration - avidly. Then Dave said: "...so Yamo asked the nurse: 'am I going to make it though the day?"' You've got three guesses: who started bawling?

The thing about narratives, as Fred Hagstrom once said, is that it is the responsibility of the narrator to determine the relevant points of the story. I've kept his words in the back of my head as a mental response to the occasional critiques where my narrative choices have been questioned ("that part of the story is so much more interesting-why didn't you talk about that more?"). The more time I spend in the logical world of the law, the more I know that Fred was right. After all, more often it isn't the climax of the story we remember, but another part which holds more meaning for us. For example, in Dave's story, the climax was when Yamo died. But one of us started crying before Dave got that far: it was Yamo's anticipation of death that was so striking and sad."