"Things wear out. Roofs leak, pipes freeze, glass breaks, the oil burner falls apart and goes boom, the toaster no longer pops up. The catalog is endless, and it is humiliating. You can measure a life span in many ways, by class reunions, marriages, wars, depressions. How many ice boxes and refrigerators have you used up? Then there is a long list, a Chevrolet, two Fords, two Austins, three VWs, this makes one feel old indeed. Why I can remember driving across New York State Route 20 and enjoying it. . . We live in a beautiful and in a violent world, and the objects we use so carelessly and delight in most especially are all subject to the degradation of matter."

– Theodore Baird, "Shays Street," The Most of It: Essays on Language and the Imagination (1999)

Theodore Baird was an emeritus professor of English at Amherst College and notably a client of Frank Lloyd Wright with theTheodore Baird Residence or the Baird House on Shays Street, Amherst, Massachusetts, US.