The moon this morning, though only a sliver, shone so brightly that it lit up my bedroom despite the curtains being closed.  It made me think of the term "moonshine"; not in its sense of illegal booze but in that sense that is a gentle term for nonsense or fantasy.  What is it about a bright moon that seems to conjure up this longing to be out having adventure or romance, or to be elsewhere?  I have two extremely intense memories of brilliant full moon nights from when I was young, and neither of them was really remarkable for what I did or anything else, except that on both occasions I was filled with an inchoate longing for things that I couldn't quite describe. 

A full moon night is like a movie in black and white; there is a vivid awareness of possibility and of momentous happenings, and things are eerily clear, yet there is no color.  One can't really see into the shadows; things are lit and easily seen in the light, or they are completely dark just inches into any shadows.  These are nights to believe in elves and fairies, or if one's bent is otherwise, of lurking evil and enemies waiting in hedgerows and spinneys to attack. 

I recall one such night when I was just edging into my teens; I was on the farm in my small bedroom whose only window faced away from the highway, and looked over the back yard and the fields beyond to where they dipped out of sight into the gentle declivity which eventually led to the railway that bisected the lower part of the farm, the silent creek slipping between its wooded banks beyond it, and to the dark far hills to the north.  I was leaning out of the open window and wanting, with the intensity that adolescence usually reserves for lust, to go somewhere or to do something thrilling, but I had no idea what.  The night was too full of possibility and promise just to remain in my room, yet where would I go?  I wasn't really thinking of solitary adventure, but of a brilliant life just beyond those hills full of amazing people; the kind of mysterious world that British novels seemed to attribute to India when she was still a part of the Empire.  I was probably a year or so from the age when such feelings would involve romance of a sexual nature; but my feelings had the quality and intensity of new love.  But I couldn't articulate what I longed for, even in my own mind.  All I knew was that it was not what I had where I was, all the familiar things and people, the goings to bed and gettings up, school, chores, summer's constant search for something to do.  It is the irony in which Life loves to indulge that I long with nearly the same intensity now to be in that room again with the sounds of my brothers and sister getting ready for bed, the movements below of my mother in the kitchen finishing up the tasks which would need to be done again the next night and the next; she'd probably be singing to herself as she usually did while working.  Nothing happened that night different from any other and I did no more than go to bed as always; I have no idea why I can recall it with such clarity and why, more than fifty years later, any brilliant moonlight night brings back the memory of that lovely still night.  I wonder if that was when I decided that I would have to go to the strangest places I could find, and come to know those most different than myself? 

The second moonlit night that I recall with such clarity came in the winter.  A fall of a foot or more of snow had just completed and the night was utterly clear and was crisply cold, but not so cold as to lead one to huddle inside near the heat.  It was the kind of winter night that voices seemed to carry for miles and sounds seemed to have those crystalline edges that they have in icy weather.  The moon's brilliant light was enhanced and flung back from the snow which covered everything in smooth unbroken undulations of a white that was beyond white, yet silvered with a dusky shadow wherever it edged out of the moon’s direct glare.  I was walking down over one of our back fields with a neighbor boy Alistair, whose family had recently purchased a new house built on what had been our upper pasture.   Allie and I had become best friends for a brief time; on my side it was the first time I had been completely in love with someone; on his side, I don't know what it was.  For me there was no point to any day in which I did not see him.  Anything was worth doing if he was doing it with me.  I was years away - ten years at least - from the first time I would finally have a physical relationship with someone, but I was in the middle of my first bout of intense love, and so to be walking alone with Allie over the glistering back hill was a fitting way to celebrate a night of such beauty.  We were singing a hit song by Jack Scott, which had recently begun playing on pop radio, called "Goodbye, Baby".  Jack Scott had a number of hit songs in the 50s and I am always surprised that he never seems to be included in any of the nostalgia collections.  He had a deep voice, and in appearance he was so perfectly the picture of the 50s pop singer, his hair elaborately combed up and forward, shining with Brylcreme or whatever he used, that I would have expected him to be better remembered.  I know he still is represented on my iPod. 

Allie and I were headed for Stadtholder's cabin, which was a large two room structure in the woods on the back of the Stadtholder farm which bordered our farm to the east.  I believe this cabin had been built by the Halsteads, the wealthy and prominent family who had originally owned that farm and who had built the beautiful square farmhouse with its great white cupola, the house where the Stadtholders now lived.  The Halsteads had been early settlers in Reedville and the meeting of three roads that their home faced once was known as Halstead's Corners.  For reasons I never really knew, the family lost nearly everything and my Uncle Charlie, Dad's oldest brother, who was a lawyer, had managed to save for the last of the family a sliver of land with a tiny tenant house across the highway from the big house where Emma Halstead, who never married, lived for the rest of her life.  One of those state historical markers now stands in front of the big house describing the importance of "Halstead House". 

The cabin was a well-made rectangular building, painted brown.  Two thirds of the interior formed a large room with an enormous fieldstone fireplace at one end whose stones merged into a wide chimney which rose to the ceiling and beyond.  This great stone structure extended beyond the wooden walls outside and was the most noticeable feature of the cabin as one approached.  There were large doors on each of the long sides of the cabin, both of which opened into the great room which held the fireplace.  The rafters were visible and a large plain chandelier hung in the middle of the room.  The other third of the cabin, opposite the fireplace, was divided into a kitchen which was rustic but reasonably modern for the 50s, and I am absolutely blank on what the other corner of the building held, which shared a wall with the kitchen, but I assume it must have been a bathroom.  I just have no recollection of it at all.  I don't know that the Stadtholders made much personal use of the cabin, but they loaned it out to the local firemen and others for clambakes and other events.  Some people in town started a day camp for the kids (keeping us out of trouble) and eventually this was moved from the Town Hall where it was held when I attended, to the Stadtholder's cabin.  This Day Camp became rather elaborate with subcamps set up in tents tucked amongst the oaks and maples and basswoods of Stadtholder's woods for the week where the kids were broken into groups by age and gender.  One of my later teenage joys was to sneak up on these tents at night with Allie and my brother Gary and Ralph Stadtholder and scare the living hell out of the campers. 

But all of that was later and for another time.  On the night abut which I am talking, nothing much happened.  Allie and I got to the cabin, broke in (as we always did), could think of nothing much to do there, and went home.  There is no real reason to remember that night, and yet I do, with an intensity and detail that astonishes me.  The part that I always see first in my mind is the image of Allie and me walking in the middle of a wide field in virgin snow down the gentle slope of that long hill that extended beyond our farm in both directions, singing "Goodbye, Baby", me feeling every moment deeply and fully, me loving Allie with a hopeless painful depth, and feeling the same inexplicable frustration I had felt looking out my window some summer evening before, that there must be something, something, more than the dailiness of life, some wonderful place I could get to somehow if I just walked far enough, or to which I knew the direction, or perhaps even might be right there if only Allie would stop and put his hands on me and look right at me and say, "I really like you better than anyone else on Earth". 

I have actually gotten to rather a lot of places since that time, and met the strangest people I could find, and yet there is really no place and no adventure that quite fulfilled that yearning I felt on those full moon nights.  I suppose such adolescent feelings are why people conjure up belief in a heaven to come, or an Eden that has gone before.  Certainly love is involved somewhere in the mix.  But really, it is all moonshine: inexplicable, untouchable, diaphanous, unreachable.  And as long as you suspect that that wonderful place really exists, and that wonderful adventure might still lie ahead, life is, at least a little bit, worth living.

Finally I had a decent drive home this weekend, after a number of weeks of navigating through various quantities - none small - of heavenly attacks of water in all of its various forms, most of which formed piles on the highway for the trucks in front of me to fling onto my windshield.  But this week was sunny, blue-skied and the traffic sparse; apparently if there was no easy way to vex me, other drivers saw no reason to venture forth. 

Other than weather and the information that my brain was defective, last week pretty much brought benisons.  I got more than a thousand bucks in company profit sharing, and then reached home to find that my former company that had sold me to National Upsy Daisy was giving me eighty three bucks in profit sharing, too - which wasn't bad since I left there over a year ago.  Enough to fill my Miata tank twice over and still have something over to play the lottery in the dim hope that it might rescue me from the prospect of ever having to return to further profit my current master. 

I have the unfortunate habit of turning on one or another of the cable news channels while I get ready for work in the morning, and thus have been regaled with the outrage of various professionally displeased talkers when some black preacher in Chicago said pretty much what such tele-clergy as Falwell and Robertson have been saying for years.  Apparently it is not OK to exult when sinful America gets it in the neck via Mideastern terrorists, but entirely fine to do so when America gets it in the neck via hurricanes and other natural disasters.  As far as I can see the difference is that the hand of god is more easily discerned when the preacher is white and the victims are primarily black than when the reverse is true.  And so the good Senator has discovered belatedly what I have known for years: that you will always be screwed in the end by your clergyman.  This probably could have been delayed somewhat by vastly more generous cash gifts to the preacher, but in the end the three duties of any clergyman are blackmail, extortion and sanctimony, (screwing your kids is a perq, not a duty); so it was gonna happen eventually.   A lot of people should be grateful to the Rev for giving them cover for declining to vote for a black guy whom they were never going to vote for whatever they might have told pollsters.  It is amusing to hear a whole lot of white folks shocked, shocked! – at being on the receiving end of a hate spiel from the pulpit just for the way they were born.  You get used to it; take it from a gay guy who has heard this kind of thing from the pulpit since he was the age of Obama’s youngest.  No one ever expressed any concern about what guys like me had to listen to of a Sunday when we were kids. 

We here in New York have been getting a great deal of entertainment value from our governors lately; it is way overdue for us to get some return for the handsome salaries we pay them.  One governor made an exit because he had banged a woman a few times, so the new governor called a press conference - several, I believe - and regaled us with tales of banging nearly every female he encountered; and not only that, but presented us with the two-for-the-price-of-one deal that his wife had been banging extra-maritally also.  This is entertainment of a high order.  And once again we learn the basic rule of politics which is that the press will never forgive you for not keeping them in the loop.  All Spitzer had to do was tell some journalist, "Hey, look what I'm getting for only $4300!" and he'd be with us today.  Paterson is smart to keep regaling the press with one conquest after another.  Pretty soon his press conferences will thin out - he can just e-mail the press a standard, "Whoopee!  I did it again" message anytime there's an update.  Page 10 at best.   Although, I must say, I totally was blown away when the sex angle paled, to see the Gov switch gears and recount his marijuana adventures.  And as the reporters deprted, he was forced to add, “Hey!  Yo!  Cocaine, too!”  I heart NY!

Moving on to even higher-priced whores, I see that the one-legged harridan that Sir Paul McCartney wed against the advice of all of his children, as well as that of anyone who knew the female in question, has made nearly fifty million for a mere four years of suffering: having to attend A-list parties, live in luxe homes and the like.  There is something seriously wrong with the divorce law in both England and the US of A.  It is one thing - and a proper thing - to grant sufficient alimony to women who married young and spent years in a marriage when they could have been starting a career, only to find themselves parked curbside when the later models came along.  However, it is outrageous to award millions to adult working women who had successful careers prior to entering into a marriage, particularly when they were able to continue these careers while married, and especially when the marriage is a brief one.  Everyone is all pissy about some low-skilled woman getting a few bucks a month on the dole at others' expense, while exhibiting no outrage at all at the idea that some privileged woman can sit on her ass for the rest of her life at the expense of some guy who doesn't even get laid for the money.  It is high time that the law set up a standard proportion of the payer's earnings to be granted to the payee.  For less than a year of marriage, nothing at all should be paid, since if the marriage was that bad, merely ending it should be reward enough.  Then the proportion could rise with the years spent in the marriage.  We could keep the current system for cases when there was physical abuse; I have no sympathy whatever for men who hit women.  Although I am tickled just a little fantasizing the judge granting Sir Paul one good swat at Heather for the 48 mill.  If he is otherwise engaged, I could be persuaded to do so in his stead. 

I live to serve.

Some months ago I was having a chat with my doc and I complained that I was forgetting words now and again and that it bothered me.  So she scheduled me for a brain scan of some sort, which turned out to be a comedy of errors to some extent; although a nurse could do the scan, a doctor was needed to give me some kind of shot to make my brain turn purple or something, and no doctor could be found at the time I was there.  So the nurse went and rolled me into the oven or whatever it is, and something spun around me while efforts were made to locate a doc.  At last a doc was found, and I was pulled from the oven, rather well done, and the doc proceeded to give me some kind of procedure involving a needle being inserted into the outside of my elbow (with rather more difficulty than one might expect: I mean, there’s the elbow, and there’s the needle – what’s the problem?)  I rather suspect that this procedure was banned before the Bush government came down foursquare in favor of torture so long as one didn’t actually use the word “torture” to describe it.  I know I was ready to tell any secrets and to accept Islam before he was finished.  But oddly, as soon as the ramming and jamming ceased, and I was looking warily at a jug of water with which I was pretty certain waterboarding was about to commence, the nurse said, “OK, you can put your shirt on; we are finished.”  This sounded somewhat dismissive, and I asked, “You mean I can go?” and she assured me I spake sooth.  I was mystified at receiving the whole needle thing after the scan, but decided that maybe it was a revenge for my having subjected an impressionable woman to the sight of my upper torso without a shirt, so I re-wrapped the offending (and smarting) upper self and departed, and nothing more was heard about the whole thing. 

So anyway, I was having another séance with my doc last week and after going over all my sins of omission exercise-wise, and of commission candy and ice cream-wise, she concluded with, “Is there anything that you have been concerned about?”  And, rightly surmising that she wasn’t opening a discussion on finances or national politics, I mentioned again that it really bothered me that I seemed to forget words I knew to an extend that I sometimes found my self waving my hand in a “you know, like, yadda yadda” gesture rather than actually finishing the sentence upon which I had embarked. 

“Would you,” asked she, “Like to get a brain scan?”

Quoth I, ”I had one months ago – and a mighty odd experience it was, too.”   

“And what did they say?”

“Well, nothing,” I went on.  Then I gave a brief résumé of the odd ‘scan first, torture second scenario’ I had endured.  I garnered a “hmmm” in response and she picked up my file and began flipping through it.  “Oh yes,” she said, “here it is.”   And she proceeded to regale me with the contents of what had apparently been a highly classified document.  “It says,” she said, “that you have minor generalized deterioration of the cerebrum.” 

Well this was not exactly the news I was hoping to hear on a day that had already been so dire at work that day that I had viewed my four o’clock doctor’s appointment as comic relief.  Some laugh this was proving to be. 

Anyway we proceeded to indulge in some badinage about the prospects of my coming classification among the rutabagas and kohlrabi of the human race, and I am set up for another round of scanning and, presumably, torture to see if the old lobes have rotted any further.  None of this is what I would have had in mind for the week, were I to have a mind to have it in, if you follow that. 

And if you don’t; well, what can you expect from a person whose frontal lobe is a mass of putrifying flesh?

Everytime I start thinking that people are basically good, one of my more outré relatives drops by and I am restored to a sense of reality.  Have you ever met one of those folk who seems to have an exhaustive list tucked away somewhere of the worst possible way to react in every situation, and who invariable acts accordingly?  Lemme tellya about my cousin Terry.  Terry is the very youngest of all my first cousins on the Momster’s side.  Her parents were Uncle Stan and Aunt Connie whom we met previously in an entry called “A Life”.  Stan and Connie, who cared only for themselves, had two daughters and then when everyone was pretty sure that all my Mom’s sisters had completed their task in the ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ department, Connie and Stan had a late-arriving little surprise.  But whereas Dottie and Cindy, the two daughters that had been more or less expected, who were born, and pretty much dropped off at Stan’s parents to raise, were blondish and attractive, Terry was a stolid dark-browed child upon whom the two doted, and whom they actually raised themselves – perhaps recognizing in her that same lack of moral compass by which their life had (well, this metaphor just ran into an awkward spot, didn’t it?) been guided.  Or not guided.  (I am wholly undone logically and grammatically by this compass-lack thing I got myself into). 

As one of the older cousins, I was pretty much off on my life adventures when Terry came along, and I saw her rarely, and mostly in pictures.  If Aunt Connie was around – which she mostly wasn’t – I’d hear a bit of “Terry this” or "Terry that” but I took it as more of that same Crawfordian attitude of children as accessories, rather than the real affection which it proved to be.  Stan, too, doted upon the little succubus, and in this child they were to receive a good deal of that karmic payback that they so richly earned with their many fraudulent schemes to bilk all whom they met out of their houses, their cars, their time and, best of all, their cash. 

The second youngest of the cousins on the mater’s side, was Aaron, the youngest son of Mom and Aunt Connie’s second-youngest sister Emily, a lady who was beautiful, interesting and kind, none of which characteristics Aaron acquired.  Aaron was severely dyslexic, in a time when this was ill-understood and rarely diagnosed, so he came off as very dumb in school.  He grew up to be rather tall, and while the tall guys have it over us normal-to-short guys in nearly every way, there is one case in which they are well and truly cursed.  This is the fact that if they are dumb-acting and diffident, they look way dumber and more boob-like than the average guy.  Unfortunately, Aunt Emily became overly protective of her little (or rather big) boob, believing that he was not nearly as dumb as he seemed.; which, when you come to think of it, would not be humanly possible. 

Being younger than all the other cousins, none of which were known for kindness or generosity towards those relatives who were weaker, smaller, or who told on us, these two coddled cousins became best friends.  This friendship persisted into adulthood. 

Terry didn’t really swim into my life until years later when I was living in San Francisco with Tumwell.  Dottie, Terry’s oldest sister, moved to the city fleeing a brief marriage which terminated with her having some sort of improper relationship with the Best Man although not on the altar or at the wedding itself, either of which would have won a great deal more of my sympathy than the paltry and half-explained truth.  But what the hell; by the family’s lights I am sure Tumwell and I were doing far worse, so I will just pass by this whole ‘mote in her eye, beam in my own’ – just to put it all into biblical metaphor.  Dottie spent a lot of time with us, as well as cursing my life briefly by inserting into it a colleague from work who thought it hysterically funny to call me “Cousin David”, since her surname was the same as mine, (and her devotion to alcohol in all its guises even greater than mine, it turned out).   In the course of time Dottie, who was a nurse, went off to the Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai border leaving me and Tumwell to enable her selflessness by shlepping around all the furniture and boxes she left behind.  In that ability to put all she whom she met to good use, Dottie had not fallen all that far from the parental tree, despite the rarity of her interaction with them as a child.  “Look good and let the little people do the heavy lifting” was practically the credo on which her family was founded. 

In the fullness of time those ladies who toiled and did good in the refugee camps returned clutching souvenirs and memorabilia from their stay there; some brought paintings on silk, or lovely sketches, or silk blouses or photographs; Dottie brought Wen.  In fact, this actual bringing of Wen took more than a year to accomplish, but Dottie was well and truly wed (again) to him before she returned.  When Wen did arrive, Terry, who was about 17 then, came to California to visit and to acquaint herself with her new relative-in-law.  Dottie, Wen and Terry came to dinner at the house in Oakland which Tumwell and I had purchased in the meantime and into which we had moved ourselves and Dottie’s extensive collection of belongings some time before.  Terry seemed quite nice and likeable, although this was to be the last time I was to find her to be either of those things. 

Years later, when I returned from Saudi, after Tumwell had passed away, I moved back east.  Aaron had married a young woman who had been a foster child of someone or some such, and had moved in across the way from my mother.  I disliked this young woman from the day we met.  Aaron saw me outside when he returned from some errand with her, and brought her over for introductions as soon as they emerged from the car.  “This,” he began, “is my cousin David.”  “Aaron,” she whined, “we have to get [whatever it was] finished.”  Now, I am not saying that I am the thrill of a lifetime or anything (I am, but that’s beside the point); but I gotta say that when one’s new husband introduces one to his relatives, one does well to at least spend a moment in pleasantries, assuming that one’s house is not actually on fire, or the baby lying in the roadway.  At least give the new relative time to be a pain in the ass, before making clear that you find him to be one.  There is an etiquette to these things, even in my family. 

Not too much later, after Aaron and Kitty (for so I shall call her) had a baby, I was again visiting the Momster and across the way was Kitty with what proved to be my cousin Terry.  No one could be more cordial than this woman whom I had last seen as a slim 17-year-old in Oakland.  She now had coal black hair (it had previously been brown), a crew-cut cum mullet, and an additional 50 pounds on a frame that did not need it, and the  general demeanor of one who had just parked the 18-wheeler behind the bar out back.  She was, in fact, quite fubsy in appearance.  After a few pleasantries, under which Kitty bore up beautifully, Terry began asking me advice about various bits of the shrubbery around Kitty and Aaron’s place.  At first I was anxious to be helpful, but I began to sense that I was being subtly mocked.  The two ladies sat themselves in adjoining patio lounges and proceeded to greet each of my remarks with conspiratorial glances at each other and giggles right out of the eighth grade.  I had not lived in San Francisco for nothing, and it was not long before I picked up on a certain subtle undertone.  “Oho!” thought I, “so that’s the way the wind doth blow!”  I tend to wax archaic in moments of social discomfort.

Ere long, of course, Kitty had left Aaron for Terry, (remember Aaron and Terry were lifelong best pals) who after wringing all the drama possible out of a custody fight over the newborn, which the mother won as is the usual case when she has not actually been caught on camera committing murder and treason or having sex with the child more than once (and even then it is a toss-up), became bored with the lady and rid herself of her.  Kitty became equally bored with the joys of motherhood and began dumping the boy on Aaron whenever she wanted a respite which was nearly all the time.  Aaron thus got to raise a child over whom he had no legal authority, and in which he had no say in matters of discipline.  That he did so is less a testament to his goodness, than it is to his boobishness, but perhaps I am harsh.  I know that if I were expected to contribute to the comfort of a woman who had humiliated me and gotten custody with accusations that were as shameful as they were false, that expectation would be in vain, unless custody was returned to me, together with the authority to make parental decisions.  So far the kid seems to be only a minor jerk, but it doesn’t bode well. 

Once rid of Kitty, Terry somehow acquired AIDS (apparently skipping the HIV period altogether) – or said she did, and began to discover the joys of commanding the attention of her aging and hapless parents twenty-four/seven.  There was nothing Terry didn’t require, and require right now.  Connie who rarely bestirred herself for anyone sent Stan on constant errands.  Terry needed medication, doctor’s visits, her electic wiring fixed, her car fixed (the car on one occasion was abandoned in Albany or Vermont or someplace between the two, and my brother Luke who will do anything for anyone, was asked to go along and do the actual fixing – a trip of several hours, made longer by inaccurate information and every block that Terry could improvise at a moment’s notice.).  Terry is the highest maintenance kind of woman, while looking like the lowest maintenance kind – the kind a prudent person would have traded in on anything else long ago.  Don’t overlook the point here, that this poor sick girl had been plenty able to get her car many hours away from home before abandoning it and continuing on with her voyage to wherever; in short, she was as sick on any given day as she wanted to be. 

Terry announced she had been alcoholic since age 11.  Terry went into therapy, preferring the most charlatan of practioners, as is the custom of some of my mother’s family.  To them (and my mother is an extreme exception to this), if there is a diploma on the wall, they “are only out for money” – but let the beads-and-scarves motif rear its head; let the office be overrun with sick cats and flatulent dogs – then that practitioner knows what’s what.  This belief has never wavered through lost babies, severe impairment from bad dosages of the wrong medicine, near loss of eyesight.  The curse of that family is that they simply never are willing to accept that anything is what it seems.  In addition, of course, the one thing that rouses Terry from lethargy to ire, is a proposal of any solution that might in some small way alleviate her ills, of which she is very proud.

Terry, of course, needs extensive therapy at the state’s expense, although she scoffs at the various clinics’ unwillingness to agree with her self-diagnosis of ‘multiple personality disorder’ – a diagnosis that exempts from any accountability the Terry in whose presence you are basking at the moment.  Believe me, if one finds her one personality offensive and irritating, no one, not even a professional, wants to deal with the possibility of there being more than one.   Since Aunt Connie’s death a few months ago, Uncle Stan, a man in his 80’s, has been kept hopping.  Terry has taken to taping her nose up, greeting the startled viewer with open and forward-thrust nostrils in order ‘to breathe better’ and to incidentally give her the appearance of a pig.  I mean a literal pig, not the figurative sexist epithet kind of pig. 

A small vignette from our last meeting (at which she managed to make my mother’s Alzheimer’s all about her, and offered to help out by giving us pamphlets):  It was the day after Aunt Connie’s funeral, where Warren (her nephew, and Dottie and Wen’s incredibly nice son) had told me that Uncle Stan could give me his e-mail address for the duration of his time surging in Iraq, for which he was leaving directly from the graveside.   I dropped by Uncle Stan’s to re-extend my condolences and to get the address.  Stan took me to his kitchen to write down the address, and handed it to me while we talked about Aunt Connie, and Dottie and Warren, of whom he is, with reason, very proud.  In mid sentence, Terry came up and began talking to him about something completely different (and about herself).  “Oh, you have to excuse me,” she added with that air of triumph with which the infirm so often announce their infirmities. “I have ADD and that’s why I interrupt people all the time.”  (I hereby apologize to all ADD sufferers everywhere for the implication that their condition robs them of any semblance of good manners.)  With that, from behind the pig-nose, she gave me a rueful smile that was meant, I believe, to be winning.

Believe me, that’s a ship that has sailed long since – and sank.