These days, Ms. Barrett says, she occasionally gets dizzy spells and contends with a partial loss of hearing in one ear.
As he moves away from his surrogate mother (if panic-dialing her often) and contends with a patriarchal problem (the plot thickens, slightly), Tim travels a classic path of enlightenment that runs parallel with our own understanding of him.
When Siglufjordur, a small mountain town in northern Iceland, was hit by a series of storms last summer, construction workers clearing a roadway soon found themselves dodging mudslides and contending with a flooded river.
He could also benefit from what some Republicans see as a modest vein of Bush nostalgia, marked by a video shown at the Republican National Convention about his father, who is 88 and contending with a form of Parkinson's disease and declining health.
Her exertions and the image of a threshold strongly recalled "Errand Into the Maze," Martha Graham's often revived work of 1947 about a questing woman who ventures into a labyrinth and contends with a beast akin to the mythological monster known as the Minotaur.
But now, in her 40's and back home in Cleveland, facing her siblings' anger for the wreckage she left behind and contending with a staggeringly self-absorbed teenage daughter of her own, Jenny has a story that feels more like a rap sheet.
Obama's health care legislation will get between you and your doctor, force you to pay higher taxes and, while failing to lengthen your life, compel you to spend much, much more of it filling out forms, standing in lines and contending with a new bureaucracy that will make the U.S. Postal Service seem a very model of efficiency.
Mr. Spector used a workbook to guide the discussion; every Sunday, we began by reading a kind of modern parable or cautionary tale, and then contended with a series of imponderable questions.
As crews hacked away at downed trees and replaced blown-out transformers and cut lines, state and local officials contended with a plethora of other problems, among them a tiger on the loose.
She and her younger brother contended with a single parent living through paranoia and auditory hallucinations that eventually cost their mother the loss of her job and then their home.
