“‘Here’s to the winners,’ Frank Sinatra used to sing, belting out Joe Raposo’s lyrics as only a winner can. ‘Here’s to the winners all of us can be.’ Right, and if you believe that, have I got a bridge for you. One of the truths of human existence is that, to one degree or another, all of us are born losers — in the end, of course, everyone loses, even Michael Jordan and Donald Trump — and that coming to terms with disappointment, accepting the inevitability of it, is one of life’s inescapable challenges. Kris Kristofferson, not Raposo, got it right: ‘Nobody wins.’ This may be a core truth, but it’s usually ignored or scanted by historians and social scientists, for whom triumph is an irresistible story and who tend to write about losers only when they go down in spectacular flames: Napoleon at Waterloo, Hitler in the bunker, Sonny Liston flat on the mat. Yet though the losses and setbacks with which most of us are familiar rarely are dramatic, they are intensely human and have a lot to say about us as individuals and about the society in which we live. They are stories that deserve to be told.”

---

Their quarrel sent them reeling from the house.
Anything, just get on the road and get away.
Driven out, they drove . . . miles into countryside,
confined and bickering, then cold, polite;
she read a book, or looked out at hillside pastures;
once, faraway life came close, and they stopped
in mist for muddy, slow cows at a crossing,
then, tilted, shuddering, a tractor came across;
coldly silent other hours of trees after trees
interspersed with straggling villages — then hot;
her voice pulsing, tempestuous, against the dash,
buffeted, blew up; then slammed her hand down, hard.
“You let it happen — you know you did.
And you make me the bad one — all the time!
I won’t stand for it another second.” And then,
irrationally, “Look at me, I’m talking to you!”
What half-faced her was mulish, scolded sullenness
— who gripped the wheel and to scare her drove faster,
scaring himself; he felt out of control, dangerous.
Downhill, the road darkened, dropped out of sight.
At the bottom, racing toward them, three lights,
and trees . . . . Remember this, remember this,
she thought, the last thing I will ever see.
Diner, tavern, caf