Author: schnepp

The Four Horse

I tore up my ticket in disgust. My pony lost it at the eighth pole. This other nag, at forty to one no less, exploded out of nowhere and trashed the field. His jockey never even used the whip, for Godssake. My horse was sure to win; at least in my own mind. I mean, I go to the track plenty, I’m something of a student of the art of handicapping. Ever since I moved to Miami and became fascinated by the statistics, the huge quantity of sheer information available about each horse in each race, highlighted by the various tout sheets for sale around the track, I was hooked. A worthy undertaking for an active mind in retirement, and each exercise of the art costs a mere two dollars.

Hialeah is a beautiful track, a rich, almost brown oval framed by tall palm trees waving in the Florida breeze against a tapestry of blue sky punctuated by scudding puffs of white clouds marching towards the ocean. It is a peaceful place underneath the pounding beat of the horses, and splashed with racing colors and peppered with people of all sorts, well worth a critical look and a random speculation as to provenance, wealth and personality.

And yesterday, a diminutive, well-tanned man caught my eye and tweaked my imagination by reason of his serene demeanor. One thing about people at the track; they typically carry a harried aura around with them. There is not a lot of time between races to figure out how to lay down one’s bets if you are more than a two-dollar-on-the-nose kind of guy, and you need to consider not only what you studied the night before in the statistics but also the late scratches, the moving odds on the tote board indicating, perhaps, the direction of the smart money, and how your favorite pony looks in the slow walk to the starting gate. But this fellow, well, he was just walking towards a cashier with a thin grin, holding what looked like a single ticket. And his dress was unusual in that it was, well, stylish but not in a race-track-y sort of way; sharp crease in his trousers, crisp oxford button-down shirt, well-cut seersucker blazer, and a pocket hanky matching the band on his boater.

But what really caught my eye was what I was able to see about his transaction at the betting window. It took a long time to process his one ticket, the woman behind the cage seemed to take forever to count out a reasonably large stack of bills. Unless he was getting his pay-off in single dollar notes, he had quite a hit.

You generally do not start a chat with someone at the track. It is just not, well, protocol. Single men at the track are often lost in the process, alone with their horses and strategies, jealous of their judgments, and in spite of the reputation of bettors as active “touts” giving advice to anyone who will listen, at least at Hialeah I have just about never seen anyone talk to strangers. But a few minutes later I found myself standing next to this fellow in the mens room, each of us slowly relieving ourselves in the way that men in their seventies typically do – slowly, carefully, and accompanied by a gentle sigh signaling success.

“Excuse me, sir, and I don’t mean to intrude, but you seemed to have the last race doped out; I had the two horse and while not the favorite I was very high on him.” Notice I did not ask for any information, just put that comment out there to see what would come back to me.

He turned his head slightly and narrowed his eyes, taking my measure it seemed. “Come here often, do you,” he asked.

“Yes, I do, a couple of times a week during the season, matter of fact. I find it – peaceful and beautiful. I love the horses, they are sort of stately if you know what I mean.”

“Really? I actually never look at them. They are sort of irrelevant.”

We each stood there, shaking off the last drops from our wrinkled tools, a couple of old men in the most awkward of moments. But I could not resist.

“How can you say that the horses don’t matter at a horse race? I mean, we come to watch them race against each other, the whole thing is about the horses. Yes?”

We walked to the sinks together, at first in silence. Then he turned to me again. “Buy me a cup of coffee?”

“Sure if you tell me how you doped out that last race.”

“Not sure I’m willing to do that but I only bet the sixth race and I could use a cup of coffee.”

We spent a pleasant twenty minutes or so just chatting. A widower like me, Carl acquired his mildly British lilt as a researcher with a team of antiquarians working in the mid-East; his life had been spent in preserving and translating ancient Hebraic scrolls found in cliffs some distance from the site of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls site. Turned out he was doing graduate work at Columbia at the same time I was in law school there and we traded recollections of restaurants, events, what the city was like fifty years ago. Suffice it to say we hit if off pretty well, a couple of older guys who found out, by talking with each other, just how lonely they really were while living under the sun in God’s Waiting Room.

“Let me suggest we have dinner tonight,” Carl finally said. “It is hard to find someone to talk to down here. I really don’t like Florida at all, the heat reminds me of the caves and hills where I worked for decades. Most of the people I meet are just plain boring. If it weren’t for my work, I would live in London. Or New York.”

“You are working,” I asked with some surprise.

He grinned. “Yes, I am working. In fact, you just saw me working.”

I must have looked confused; I was confused. Carl reached across the small formica table and patted the back of my hand. “Tonight at Jonah’s Crab Shack on 21st. I’ll explain.”

That night I took a cab to Jonah’s, a restaurant I did not frequent on my adequate but finite budget. It was the kind of Florida restaurant where most of the menu consisted of sea-food flown in from Boston to cater to the tastes of snow-birds who really never did get the idea of what Miami had to offer. But Carl had invited me and in the back of my mind I harbored the hope that he would think it appropriate to pick up the check also. He was waiting for me; the maitre’d smiled at me and said he would take me to Mr. Lester’s table; seemed Carl was something of a regular.

We both ordered the grouper with an excellent panko crust and Carl mentioned in passing that he was paying so I should not be concerned when he ordered a $700 bottle of Le Montrachet and, as the evening wore on, he ordered a second. By 9:30 we had been at table for three hours and the restaurant was emptying; even at expensive Florida restaurants it is an early crowd unless you are a Metrosexual hanging at South Beach. Carl leaned forward, a small splash of precious wine landing in his cup of espresso.

“I have a question for you,” he almost drawled. “Can I trust you? I mean really trust you? Because frankly I think you are a kindred spirit. We could be friends, or well, maybe that overstates it, but at least regular acquaintances, you know. So, what do you think?”

I hesitated, not because I thought myself untrustworthy but, rather, because I was taken aback by the question and its circumstances. Then realizing that my delay in answering might be taken in a negative way, I started to answer and found myself saying what I feared was far too much.

“Sorry for hesitating, Carl. I just was surprised, that’s all. You know, I consider myself a very trustworthy person, and loyal to my friends. I was a lawyer, as I told you, and I think the very best kind, a trusted advisor is the way I was often described. I am not sure that I want to intrude on you and burden you with any doubts, I did not mean to pry deeply into any secrets of yours. I was just frankly curious, you know.” I petered out.

“I sensed that about you, which is why I am asking you, in what seems a formal way, to promise to take my – information and keep it in confidence. Because, well,” he looked down now as he made what seemed to be a personal confession, “I could use a friend down here and you surely are the most intelligent person I have met and someone who could actually enjoy what I could tell you.”

I sat for a moment to digest it all. There was, after all, no downside for me to hear Carl’s story. It might be boring and disappointing. Or, it might be fascinating and elucidating. I surely would not generally violate a promise I made to any person so I felt confident I could and would protect whatever Carl might tell me. What did I have to lose?

“Carl, I would be delighted to be your friend. I like you and I like talking with you. I also like your taste in wines,” I said in an effort to lighten the moment, an aside he met with a broad and reassuring smile. “If you have a story to tell, I would be delighted, anxious to hear it.”

And here is what Carl told me when we retired to the lounge and sat until after midnight over snifters of Louis XIII cognac:

“It was in the summer of 1997. We discovered a small single cave about 30 klicks South of the Dead Sea site, just where the topography was changing from cliffs to desert. Not a promising site for finding caves; most are high up and easily defended and hidden, but there were some texts, Aramaic references to a people who lived between the Sea and the desert and who were revered as most holy. The leader of our team was one of these intrepid Israelis; as if each stone were a gift from the God of Abraham, each discovery a further proof of the right and entitlement of the Jews to the whole of their land. In any event, he sure as hell could find caves, I’ll give him at least that.
“It was deceptively near the base of this small escarpment, almost where you would not even look. Perhaps that is why it seemed undisturbed for so many centuries. We opened it early one morning, before the heat made it unbearable to work and drove us to our tents at mid-day, to sweat on cots, preferable to sweating in the choking dust. There were some evidences of fires and human occupation which we later used for dating, but the main thing was we were looking for amphora, the pottery vessels into which scrolls typically were stored. Since the cave was seemingly undisturbed, and far from the salty inland sea, any scrolls we might find could indeed be well preserved. And from what was recorded as a site inhabited by a holy sect.

“So to make short some details which were fascinating to us, but likely not so interesting to you, we finally found a small cache of sealed pottery vases of very great age based on their style and sparse decorations, and we carried them sealed back to our laboratory in Haifa and began the tedious task of unrolling them, preserving them and finally deciphering them. Immediately we knew that these were of the most ancient sort, the writing was so primitive that it took some effort to unlearn the techniques we had used on the Dead Sea Scrolls so that we could actually translate what was written.

“Now you will recall that when Moses came down from the mountain the first time, he was appalled by the heathen behavior of the Israelites and he smashed the tablets containing God’s commandments to express his anger. I was reading a small scroll recounting this story when something caught my attention that was new and different, however. It began with the words ‘and here is what Moses said unto me, Aaron, upon descending a second time with the Law, which Moses made me swear never to reveal unto the peoples.’ I confess that I did not tell the rest of the team of this discovery; I wanted the personal rush of pleasure of being the only person on earth who, for at least one brief moment, knew this secret of thousands of years. I never thought that the scroll was written by Aaron of course, that would be too spectacular for words and in any event would run counter to what we knew of history and the creation of the scrolls. But the revelation, I must tell you, began to make me wishfully speculate.

“And Aaron recounted in this scroll, which had been very carefully prepared and preserved with exceptional attention, that the original tablet, the one that Moses cast down upon the heads of the people and smashed to smithereens, contained not ten but twelve sacred Laws.

“I spent many nights, secretly while everyone else on the team sat in the cafes overlooking the Mediterranean, feigning vague illness so that I could sneak back to the laboratory and work on my scroll. I was looking, of course, for the missing two Laws, the word of the Lord. It seemed that Moses had in fact told Aaron the missing Laws, their content, but could it be that Aaron had not written them down, had adhered to the instructions of Moses as the vessel of God’s word and left these sacred Laws unrecorded, lost to history, known now only to the Almighty? Feverishly I strained over the text, word by word, slow progress in the midst of the ancient writings and the arcane words, some of which had to be coaxed into having meaning, a few of which were unknown even to me after forty years in the field.

“And then, one night, my last night with the scroll, I found what I was looking for. It read, and I will never forget it, ‘I Aaron, unworthy of Yahweh’s forgiveness but unable to control my desire to know all of His holy word, record here the precious eleventh and twelfth Laws of the Lord Most High, Blessed be His name, and here seal them in the most secret of all holy places in the wish some day, when the Lord deems the people of Israel worthy once again, that these scrolls be found and the Twelve Laws of the Tablets again be complete in the word of the Almighty, King of Kings.

“I read these two Laws then, by the dim light we used to make sure that the writings did not bleach out into illegibility, and committed them to my memory.”

Carl paused and heavily sighed. He picked up his snifter, sloshed the amber liquid, breathed its aroma, gently tilted the glass and wet the very edges of his lips, his eyes closed, his mind transported.

And me? All I could say, after a few seconds, aghast at the magnitude of the moment, all I could say was “Then what?”

Carl smiled. “I will tell you what. And you must not judge me ill. I adhered to the admonition of Moses. The Lord had omitted the last two Laws on purpose of course; there is never anything accidental in the word of God. God did not want these Laws revealed. I did what I had to do.” Carl closed his eyes, and his head fell backwards onto his shoulders, limp and rolling.

“I burned the scroll,” he whispered.

“Oh my God,” I blurted, without focusing on the irony of my words.

“Yes. I secretly burned it. I told the team nothing of it. It was just one of many scrolls, when we did the final inventory I kept silent and it was just recorded as unfortunately misplaced, but there were so many other unique writings in the other scrolls that no one spent much time worrying about it. The missing scroll was again lost to history and to mankind.”

We sat in silence then, for a few minutes, the silence of heavy portent. But of course I could not contain myself, I had to ask, even though Carl had not offered, even though I was risking the destruction of our incredible bond, our unique trust, I had to ask.

“Carl,” I started, but he held up his hand.

“You need not worry. I will tell. You don’t have to ask. I would never have told you this much unless I was intending to tell you. I have your oath. I trust your oath.

“The eleventh law was, ‘In a hard world to come, thou canst not find the power to scratch every itch.’”

We sat. I thought. “You are of course joking with me, Carl.”

“Would you like to hear the last Law, the last of the twelve Laws of the tablet,” he asked.

I was speechless. I was not prepared. I did not know what to think.

“Yes, I would,” I replied.

Carl leaned forward and almost hissed these words: “The four horse in the sixth race at Hialeah.”

12/16

False Advertising

The advertisement read:
Giusto is a powerhouse. Its hefty, taut body holds bushes of ripe blackberries and hawthorn berries, warm spices like licorice and cedar, and a beautiful balance between velvety tannins and mouthwatering acidity. Full-bodied, earthy and concentrated with rich, sweet tannins that signify aging potential, this ever- popular selection delivers a lingering finish.

Imagine my chagrin on learning that this advertised item was merely a bottle of wine, and not a young woman. (The clerk at the store, when I telephoned to place an order, was less than understanding and at one point suggested that the police might have an interest in my call, or perhaps McClean Mental Hospital.)

Imagine a “powerhouse!” And although “hefty,” at least taut. Imagine a woman redolent of berries and spices in a “beautiful balance.” No doubt such a person would be “mouthwatering.” And wealthy and kind to boot (“rich and sweet”). Yet still unspoiled by all these wonderful attributes (“earthy”). And such a woman would not much lose her charms over time, having “aging potential” that is “lingering.”

I have decided to cease dating human beings and am building a cellar of fine wine. Although such wines are of course expensive, they are cheap as compared with actually courting and marrying a woman. And they never complain if I do not text or tweet. And if I am stuck late in the office they are nonetheless silently awaiting my pleasure when I finally do return to my home. And failure at sex is now a problem that is off the table; after foreplay with any decent bottle, I fall blissfully asleep without attempting to rally for a boffo finish.

And finally, wine is so politically correct. It can be of any color. It can come from any country regardless of politics, predominant religion, membership or non-membership in any trade alliance. Who ever rejected a wine because the country of origin had failed to pay its fair share of the costs of NATO? Yes, folks, I am a new man these days and, if at work on some mornings I seem a bit unfocused, I am sure you will support me in my quest for the proper work-life balance.

The Jews of the Donald

Today’s Wall Street Journal notes the fifth wave of anti-Semitic bomb threats against Jewish community centers, all over the country, since the first of the year. The total of threats for the two months is 90. That is more than one per day. That is, on average, 540 for a whole year. With one Canadian exception, all of this within the borders of the United States. This follows the defacing of dozens of tombstones in a Jewish cemetery just the other day.

Today’s New York Times ran an article about the attack on Enlightenment values, noting that, in the past, truly enlightened people have risen up and defended principles-based social compacts against reactive forces who believe that group identity, perceived personally by your particular group (be it a country or a religion), is the best basis of governance, headed by a strong person who can lead the folk who are destined to prevail.

Seventy or so years ago, I grew up in New York City, and if there ever was a combination of melting pot plus prejudice against the other, it was New York right after the War that was fought against one country that killed Jews and another country that supplied the population for our American concentration camps.

I grew up with Kikes and Sheenies. Also Niggers and Coons. Throw in a few Spics and Wops. Spice with a few Krauts and Nips and Chinks. Are you fish, Hebe or raghead? At the same time that intellectually I could not understand why someone would hate me and curse at me and make me fearful, I feared and reviled every other group, because everyone I knew feared and reviled them. Something deep in human nature was at work then, and it is at work today, and I am sure it will always be at work. People are fiercely imperfect; perhaps evil. What mix of genetic material brought our group of killers to the top of the heap I do not know – but I can imagine what the “right stuff” looked like a few hundred thousand years ago. Frightening.

Over time, nurtured in the gentility of the East and the Ivy League, believing (almost) that a new age had dawned, I slowly lost my edge on these matters. I stopped comparing my experience in the United States to the experience of Jews in Germany between the wars. I was comforted by politicians who, for the most part, said the right thing about people of color, and about people who were born into the religion that was a magnet of death at the hands of religions whose savior preached life and love. Logical anomalies were just that; transient anomalies, we would outgrow them.

Tides always turn and, today, we are seeing the turning of our political tide. I am compelled to teach my son, cursed with the dual defects of a half-Jewish heritage and a sweet and trusting temperament, what I had hoped to leave behind in the vain believe that sometimes the tide just keeps going out. I am girding myself, and want to gird my son, against those who are certain that “it can’t happen here” and who (not to my face) mention that I am becoming a touch unhinged; “guess age catches up to all of us, he just doesn’t get it….” I hope to find my son an education that exposes him to all the darkness, curses and prejudices of the world so he is better prepared to cope personally and defend himself robustly; not one of those places that cancels appearances by those who speak evil, as if not understanding evil is the best way to defeat it.

To my mind intelligence is to recognize the painful truth which everyone runs away from. Intelligence is to look at the politics of the country and to see red. Oh my—they are here. There are so many of them; and we were told, sure, there are a few, the unenlightened, the deplorable, they will never disappear but they will never be empowered in a systemic way so as to challenge the enlightened truth. Intelligence is taking a realistic look at the world and assessing painful risk. It is uncomfortable for yourself, and others around you, to define as intelligence so dark a conclusion, so seriously disruptive a world view. It is so – uncool – to emotionally “prove” your point by referencing millions who died before most of the current world was born, or by rebuffing reassurances by people who have merged what they have been taught to believe and what any organism knows – avoid pain, it is counter-productive.

So what do you do? The conventional answers are these: rely on the world to right itself, relax; take up civil arms against darkness by political action and legal action; conclude that there is no hope at least today as we must stand on the only beach we are afforded, and do business as usual and hope for a neap tide that floods only a bit of the world; take violent dramatic action based on the conclusion that this time is one of those really high tides that inexorably drowns the complacent many.

Pick one; all answers are available to you.

And I have been pleased to explain it all to you. For a moment there, I sort of thought you might be missing it…..

2-28-17

Breezy Day in P-Town 1980

I find myself upon an open plain,
More an unexpected mesa on the Cape,
Sharp edged but cannot see beyond,
I am on the highest land around.
Above a hazy, chalky blue-ish sky.
I’m afraid I am not standing on the ground.

And the wind is blowing the short grass
So you cannot see where it’s safe to step,
Upwind, the clouds are black and solid
With that veil of gauze that is rain, I think,
And the wind now brings me moist wet-scented smells,
Mixed with lightning’s dry electric stink.

And I am dizzy, shaking, not serene
As if myself could fly up and away
To escape from whatever may occur
Here down below where things are not so clear.
I take shorter strides with feet wider apart,
My toes curl downward, anchored against fear.

I near the rim and then do not recall
How I found my access to this open space.
An agoraphobic panic now takes hold
And I sit down on a hard-packed shelf.
My eyes shut tight against the next,
As I turtle deeper down within myself.

The last thing I recall as I walk slow,
Escorted down a path to the sea below,
Is the touch of the child who leads me where I go,
My eyes still shut. I do not want to know.
I look again only when the sand
Clings moist and sticky gritty in my hand.
I do not know what I have become,
Nor can I speak. I have been stricken dumb.

3-17

.

Modern Puppy Love

Lady barista,
Love your tats.
Pull me my coffee
And that’s that.

I only come in here
‘cause you make it special.
I see your black nails,
And gold holes in your nose.

Cupa coffee mundane?
But you got the status.
A gift from espresso
To the whole civilized world.

You got a following,
Just like some DJ.
Fill up my nostrils,
Cover me with foam.

You got beans and lemon twists
And tiny spoons.
Stirrers of pale wood, actually.
Tiny napkin on the saucer.

I like the paucity
Of our interchange.
I like more the way you look.
Your hair is so straight.

Lady barista, make my your mista.
Day old pastry only a buck.
Love the whole thing.
Let’s have a date.

for Matthew 3-17

Progression Woman

She was mother in the morning
and fire in daylight
and unfulfilled at dusk.

She was passion at the noon hour
and neediness at sundown
and resignation in the darkness.

She was suggestive at the setting
and pain in the blackness
and regret in the heart of dark mornings.

She was harlot at dawn,
Harpy at mid-day,
Ill-conceived throughout.

She was sluttish in afternoon haze,
Coquettish in evening daze
and death when the stars came out to cry.

— February 2017

The Sun is in my Eyes

The Sun is in my eyes
through slats and spaces,
Dancing off water and reflecting from windows
of buildings far away down the shore.

The Sun is in my mind
as warm tendrils sink through my eyelids
and illuminate my feelings
With a softening glow unbecoming to the season.

The Sun is in my heart
and rises on its heat
into a stream that carries me across
the sand and waves and water, to all horizons.

The Sun is burning the farms
and charring the skins
and drying the blowing earth
and leaving parched salt licks on the surface of my thoughts.

The Sun is exploding in a nova,
small star that it is, absorbing all around it
in a gaseous cloud of chaos
that obliterates me, you, our children.

The Sun has left a pulsing void,
a scar on the universe where
it once held sway over all things we know.
I am harbinger of its demise.

–February 2017

A Man for Next Season

Sept 2016

It occurred to me, around about my 118th year, that I was not about to die, at least not any time soon. At first, I thought it was just a device, that thought, designed cleverly to put me at peace so that, next morning, when I woke up dead, I would be comfortable about it. But then, when day after year it did not happen, it became clear that I was differently calibrated, and that my anomaly was my reality.

I had earlier speculated that aging led to dying in a natural, organic way; your loss of friends and family a preparatory lesson in nothingness. I eagerly read the literature about how one came to accept his mundane-ness, ubiquitous-ness, surely no uniqueness, and that the great arc of life was your fate, you were a cozy part of an endless one-ness of experience. But such, it seems, is not to be my fate.

Fear morphed into bemusement. I awaited each new day just to see its content. I ceased to look at each dawn as a blessing or a gift. I took each new day, then, as my just due, granted by no deity or truth, just another of an endless stream of canvasses on which I could paint my sloppy day-ness; some good, some bad, some forgotten, all assumed, none cherished above others nor even seemingly stolen from an emptying supply of opportunities. Indeed, I came to believe that my opportunity box was, functionally, infinite.

I then entertained a variety of perceptions, lasting some palpable number of days, months, years: superiority over mere mortals; object of awe exuding soothing ease as others rushed to bathe their lives in mine and to support me; power derived from my confidence that I could start new and ambitious projects with long time-lines without concern that I might not finish.

I wrote novels. I started esoteric collections of different things, sure I would be able to fill the albums or boxes. I confidently befriended younger people, sure I was not a mere curiosity but rather a true companion. I patiently indulged the parade of those who came seeking understanding of various things: first the gerontologists, then the true scientists with their tests and vials of blood and increasingly sophisticated diagnostic devices, then philosophers, then the lost people seeking guidance I did not possess, finally the offended and angry who sought my physical harm as an unnatural abomination sent by various satans, then the clerical keepers of various gods wanting to know what he/she/it looked/felt/sounded like, and then often the just plain people who did their lives along with mine in annual parallel, the none-too-brilliant who just understood that you did each day until you ran out of them, after which you didn’t get to do them any more.

I surrendered the often revisited thought that the old view of life was just a comforting sop designed to lull into finally accepting imminent death and thus, ultimately, I came to be young again, putting death on my back burner as far removed from my quotidian existence as to be irrelevant. I ceased fearing my fear, as I had none.

My health remained at some mid-point; my vision decayed slightly; my bicycle rides slightly less robust; my colds slightly more prolonged; my life moving evenly towards some zero point but, like an immutable mathematical slope, never reaching my long black horizontal zero axis on the graph paper of time.

Other people dying remained traumatic; I had no greater comfort or understanding. Each death of a grandchild, a great grandchild, a great-great grandchild, or of a new friend, or of a new wife of any age (and they came for me for various reasons or for no reasons, as love comes and goes), all caused the same pain, but each day I arose to feel it, to process it, and then to file it away.

I came to lay down in my cellar the most tannic and long-lived wines, confident that they would not peak after my time; something maturing over decades in its bottle was perfect for my keeping. I selected authors, gathered all their collected works, and leisurely read them stem to stern in chronological order without any sense of haste. I used the monies lavished on me by the wealthy, who wanted on occasion to talk to me, or to learn something from me, or simply to be known in their circle as my major benefactor, to live well but without ostentation; I was never afforded the chance for great wealth when younger, and found it just not to be my style.

There were decades when I would, indeed, take some job. I found selling in stores to be gratifying; although the number of stores decreased markedly for a time, thereafter people reinvented them as a mode of human socialization. I spent some time traveling also; as different parts of the earth periodically passed from being war zones to placid destinations I was able, finally, to see all there was to see. I visited the extra-terrestrial places, too, but found myself missing true gravity and large trees. The coastal cities of the Pocono mountains came to be my primary home base, although I did spend some time in the lowlands of Nepal.

Scientists long ago stopped marveling at my skin; it’s just skin, like yours. They stopped marveling at my memory, it is all the same, I never could remember faces and names, and never managed to be able to forget just about everything else. I am, finally, just allowed to live, to exist. My historical memories have been recorded in great detail and are open to all at www.smithsonian/steve.org, and few come around to listen to me talk about it any more. I have said it all, or at least all that is within me. On occasion young people or writers may come to hear stories of how it once was, in the vernacular of the day, imagining telephones and automobiles and flying devices with propellers, but even these voyages back in time have abated; all that information is so accessible in the data banks that no one bothers to access it directly from the source.

And as for the “human perspective” on all that? Well, it is just the stuff of memory, and the human gloss over time has lost its attractiveness to the modern mind.

I have learned much of course, but not what it is like to die or even to fear it, both very important data points. I am intrigued by the subjects, but not enough to precipitate the event. I think I will continue to await, expecting an infinite number of future days. The ones I have been getting are, after all and by in large, reasonably happy. To sum it all up, and so very many people ask me to sum it all up for them so they can go on their way with a lesson in their pockets, I would have to say these things: change is seldom good, flowers deserve your attention, and you should marry as often as you are able because, at any age, it is good to have a way to warm your feet in bed when you have left the window open too wide.