our hundred-year-old house in Richmond, Virginia. I barely avoided a wipeout by catching myself on a doorknob that almost shook loose, and that’s when the switch flips. I don’t “run out” of patience nearly so much as I decide that I’m out of patience. The next ten minutes are a blur. I’m barking orders and moving bodies from one place to another. But it doesn’t actually speed anything up; it just makes us all tense. In such moments, I begin to feel like an impotent general shouting commands that,