With age, life becomes complex and difficult, often fraught with risk on several levels, from the practical to the fiscal.
Glenn's 1962 Mercury flight was fraught with dramatics, from his 'Zero G and I feel fine!' exultation upon entering orbit to his reentry with what was feared was a faulty heat shield. After he safely splashed down, the nation erupted with applause and gratitude not seen since Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.
Rereading one's own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print - 'The Very Model of a Man' is the only novel of mine that has - and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
In some ways, trying to win cups is more fraught than trying to win the league, as one really bad night and everything comes crashing down.
Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.
For my daughter I would suffer through a thousand divorces, a million uncomfortable phone calls, a trillion emotionally fraught text messages.
The racial dynamics over here are fraught. White supremacy is overt. It's the reason I don't want to raise my kids here.
Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
Our problem as a country is that most of us do not want to join the euro, and we wish to stay aloof from the common frontiers of the free-travel Schengen area. This makes our relationship with the E.U. fraught with tension and trouble.
Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.
