The Words of Every Song is such a depressing book. I haven't come upon a single short story in it, that ends in favor of the main character. Some of them are incomplete too, which makes it even more depressing. I can't stand when things end-- books or movies. It pisses me off to no end.

So I happened upon this one story (in fact, I mentioned it in my last 'sentences of the week' post), it concerns an aging man who is a sounds technician in the music corporation that is the centerpiece of the book (what connects each character to one another). He receives a letter from "Geri" who is his ex-wife, whom he has not seen in fourteen years, and is the mother of his two children. So much has happened in those fourteen years:

Tony, the main character and father, has a girlfriend named Vanessa. She loves him dearly and wishes to deepen their relationship, but somewhere inside her, she knows that will never happen.
Cooking dinner last night has inspired her. She thinks--in an abstract way-- that maybe acting like Tony's wife will make Tony ask her to be his wife. If she let herself voice that hope too specifically, she'd only realize the impossibility of it. Right now it is a subconscious desire, this idea of marriage to Tony; it is far enough away from the forefront of her mind that it remains nothing but a sweet and unexamined feeling most of the time.
And then she finds the letter from Tony's ex-wife, addressed to Tony.
[She] sees a letter addressed to Tony in what looks like a woman's hand. It bears a recent post mark. She closes the drawer. She opens the drawer. She closes the drawer.
She opens the drawer, and takes the letter out, and reads it, and feels infinitely young, a child, an infant, a person incapable of self-care, and lies back on the bed, and cries like a widow.

OMG. how depressing can you get? It's slightly ridiculous that there is no hint of positivity in this book. This other passaged touched me as well. It concerns the disappearance of a father-figure, Tony, in his two children's lives: Jim and Leila.
This is when Leila was born (the younger one) and Jim and Tony are going to see her.
The hospital smelled like school, but sadder.
"Hi, honey," said his mother. "This is your sister."
"Go say hi to her," said his father. But Jim stayed back, his arms wrapped around Tony's leg. He watched the baby and felt shy . . . . . .
[Jim] realized with a sudden ache that the memory stopped at that poing, with his arms wrapped about his father's leg; he couldn't remember what Leila looked like, or what his mother looked like, or what he did next. . . . The strength of him, the width of his calf, the fabric of his pants. How Tony had reached down and placed one large hand on the back of Jim's head-- not pushing him forward, just leaving it there. Just letting him be.
That's what Jim remembers of his father.
What Leila remembers: nothing. A black shape standing over her crib. Music. Nothing.

It astounds me how many children on the face of this earth have either only one parent, or none, or have to visit each parent separately. I am so lucky, I just can't find it in myself to appreciate it. I think it has to do with their authoritarian ways. They are quite anal-retentive, which in turn, makes me anal-expulsive (sounds gross, but just means unorganized and laid-back). At least I'm aware that I have something that many don't: two wonderful, loving, if strict, parents.