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Mindful: Psalm 8

Calvin Trillin’s lighthearted and best-selling tribute to his late wife, Alice, has made husbands like me nervous. By “like me” I mean the ordinary, absentminded kind—husbands who have little more than a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly when their wives ask, “Do you notice anything different about me?” In essays that Trillin wrote as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Alice made regular appearances. Throughout their 36-year marriage, Trillin catalogued her sense of humor, her sense of style and her childlike sense of wonder.