With my body bathing in radiation, my mother-in-law gently reminded me of the requisite buffer, as my no-screw-up streak disintegrated on the recovery room floor.
My father, her son-in-law, has been gently making fun of her for years for once making spaghetti in a pressure cooker, and it's not difficult to imagine her as an actress in an infomercial, huffing dramatically as she tires of endlessly dragging a spoon around a pot when she could be using a RoboStir, for just $4.99!
Let your in-laws know, albeit gently, that their concern and care is appreciated but they do not hold a decision-making role in your family life.
The memo continued for a page and a half in this vein, referring to two partners by name as "tormentors," gently digging at law firm culture and quoting a Dickens character: "the law is a ass [sic], a idiot".
He offered them distractions, much-loved targets like health and safety, Europe (that EU directive "should diabetics be allowed to drive?") and Ed Balls, and even challenged them gently on planning law reform (they hate it) and gay marriage (they hate it less than they did).
Just a half-hour after my daughter-in-law called to tell them gently of the error, there was a knock on the door of our Upper West Side apartment, and in walked Abe, carrying a small brown paper bag containing the missing roast beef slices.
Of course, it is a perfectly natural occurrence for modern technology to collide gently with aging laws, and it will serve to spur the state into updating its policies.
He gently explained the current laws and the limits of those laws to me.
The problem is that Gently was suffering from a version of the law of diminishing returns.
But Mr. Lautenberg, who has been around so long that his signature accomplishment is the law that banned smoking on airplanes, has never been one to go gently.
