touch lightly

“It’s a case of trying to touch lightly on everything and then send people if they are really interested in the Revolutionary War to other sites that are going to go into more detail,” said the center’s director, Rickie Good.

Neat touch: lightly pickled celery, for extra tang, along with a crumble of blue cheese.

In “Words Matter,” the last of the museum’s 10 galleries, a gender nonbinary speaker explains the importance of enlarging our use of pronouns beyond “he” and “she,” one of several testimonials that touch lightly on the political and cultural fault lines of contemporary language.

As for follow-up maintenance, Crooks recommends an annual “touch,” lightly shearing plants to remove faded blossoms and encourage branching growth.

But as with Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedies, Gorey’s darkly droll tales touch—lightly—on weighty matters: the death of God, the meaning of life, and, always and everywhere, our impending mortality.