Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (stories)

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She told him her only memory of her mother.  She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day.  There was snow between the sidewalk and the street.  She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio.  She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening.  It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance. 
--From "Post and Beam," a short story by Alice Munro, published by The New Yorker (December 11, 2000) and reprinted in her collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Knopf, 2001), pp. 188-218 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition.