F. Scott Fitzgerald was a pretty smart guy, for a writer. I’ve no clue what that sentence is supposed to mean but, then again, I’m a writer. That’s my excuse. Mathematicians are concentric. Writers are eccentric. And never the twain shall meet. (Wasn’t that guy a writer too?)
One epigram FSF left us, that I am trying my unlevel best to disprove, is, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Is that so? Well, F., you might like to know I just completed a virtually sold-out run in a community theater production of Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” in which my character, Harry Edison, appears only in the second act. So there. Put that in your corn cob pipe and smoke it.
1. The Road Not Taken TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5 Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, 10 And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. 15 I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 20