Woman

The old women, thrifty with words, haggling for oranges, their mouths take bites out of the air. They know the value of oranges. They had to learn everything on their own.

The young women are the worst off, no one has bothered to show them things. You can see their minds on their faces, they are like little lakes before a storm. They don´t know it´s confusion that makes them sad. It´s lucky in a way though, because the young men take a look of confusion for inscrutability, and this excites them and makes them want to own this face they don´t understand, something to be tinkered with at their leisure.

Frank Leigh Dearie once met a woman jazz pianist with the same last name. Blossom Dearie had a voice of orange creams and long lovely fingers. Staring at Frank across the space of a tiny table in a tacky restaurant just outside San Francisco, she knew just what she wanted.

There was an old woman tossed in a basket.
Seventeen times as high as the moon;
But where she was going no mortal could tell,
For under her arm she carried a broom.

»Old woman, old woman, old woman,« said I,
»Whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?«
"To sweep the cobwebs from the sky;
And I'll be with you by-and-by

What would this world be without women.
A world full of men.

Three women are having lunch, discussing their husbands. The first says, »My husband is cheating on me, I just know it. I found a pair of stockings in his jacket pocket, and they weren't mine!«
The second says, »My husband is cheating on me, I just know it. I found a condom in his wallet, so I poked it full of holes with my sewing needle!«
The third woman fainted...

When I was in my early twenties, I knew everything there was to know about women.

Now some forty years later, I know nothing about them.

The older I get, the more baffled I am by them.

A word said to come from an abbreviation for wolf-man or woe-(to)-man. Not so. The more appropriate word comes from feline-male. In the most ancient texts found in Mesopotamia, the word Hwomman represents God.