| To-wit To-woo Dostoevsky, Kurt Vonnegut, and I spent many afternoons together. We talked about life and death, Kilgore, Grushenka,... and why, when I looked through a telescope and saw Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules, what I felt was love. We talked about loss, that special dust so many works of art crystallize around like snowflakes, and the wisdom of striving a little less for perfection and a little more for plain good.... Forty years disappeared like the past lives of novels I had read again and again. And then, one morning, I called my two friends to say I couldn't make it to our next tête-à-tête, and just as I hung up the phone, my head split wide open a tremendous, tall tree burst right through— complete with green leaves, fat golden fruit, and the seasonal bird. I tap-danced to that sweet bird's tune— to-wit to-woo, to-wit to-woo— then climbed up the tree straight out of my mind far past the two sides of the moon. |