Frequency: But (honor)

BUT (honor)

but you would not say the word

Charlie discovered how difficult it is to honor both your wife and your mistress. It involves a lot of subterfuge, secret meetings, and discrete text messages on two separate accounts.

but I need to think

Howard’s theory is that when you back people up against a wall, honor is the first thing to go. Values mean nothing to you when you feel that your life is in danger.

but I still want an answer

Helen was living in Park Slope when the planes came, and though she wanted to honor the sacrifice of all the brave souls, and she doubted that any other place would every feel like home, and she would miss the neighborhood dogs and strollers and deli, it wasn’t long before she was looking into the Bay area job market. She and Charlie would soon be finished anyway, and she had no firm commitments to anyone or any place. It took two years before she actually packed up and moved out, so you couldn’t say that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but when she did have nightmares they often featured thousands of reams of charred documents, floating down in clouds of soot.

but we still have time

Charlie maintains that there is still some honor among thieves, at least those of the old school, while in Johnnie’s experience, most of the robbers he’s met would steal your four year-old kid’s bike for a baggie of crystals. Different circles they move among. They rarely share their stories with each other. For brothers they don’t know each other very well.

but we must still try

It was a difficult conversation, the first time Charlie dropped the news on Helen that he had made a commitment he would need to honor, a commitment that would have to take precedence over what he and Helen shared. The vase of flowers missed his head by a foot and the window of her apartment by an inch or two. It could have been ugly, but it ended in the sweaty angry kind of lovemaking at which they had always excelled, and at the end of it nothing much had ended or even been resolved.

but this is not the end

Maggie bought tickets for a weekend in New York and repeated an itinerary she and her mother had laid out twenty years before, when she was dying and had wanted to do something special together. Maggie went back to all the same places. The show on Broadway was different and the Plaza was closed for repairs but the walk in Central Park was still the same. It was kind of a way for her to honor her mother’s courage, or at least to try and pull something from it.

but our time is not long

He would not be able to honor their commitment to go to his mother-in-law’s sixtieth birthday because the snowstorm was so bad that he would be stuck in the city for at least another day. He was deeply sorry, but the roads were so bad, he was sure she would understand. Sorry Anna. Awful weather. Give her a hug for me.

but you read another line

It is too easy to confuse honor with strength, or security with responsibility. The orders coming down sometimes made Howard feel like he was living in another country. Freedom didn’t have the same ring it used to.

but I know there is another place

Kent likes hanging out with builders and architects, men of honor and vision, men who can see a scrap of land and imagine a housing development. Men who never ford a river without dreaming of the bridge that ought to be there. Kent understands the boundless spirit of manifest destiny, and believes that spirit has never died.

but I have not found it

Kent was tired of the joke, of course, but the truth was he kept a stack of Superman comics under his bed until he was well into his teens, and he considered it an honor to have a name that reminded the other kids of the Man of Steel. It gave him a role model, something to aspire to.