my grandmother gave me as a gift, "When I was ten, not a bicycle, not a baseball mitt or a bat, she gave me a framed engraving of the derringer pistol that John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate the president.
VOA: special.2009.10.12
"I used to ride mybicycle round it when I was a kid, " Lella, who is 39, told me as she served me tea.
Nevertheless, with the exuberance of youth, I tired to make my way to school by bicycle and was prevented from entering several roads because of craters and unexploded bombs.
It was incomprehensible, impossible to take in, it was doomsday, it was the end of so many lives, that I turned away, got on mybicycle and sped away, crying and shaking and panicking as if I were being hunted by snipers.