| At Oceana Apartments, a breeze arises, blowing in from the Pacific.
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| The balcony doors are open, and the salt sweat scent of the sea is on his skin,
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| and on his lips, and in the air that he breathes. |
| His senses are more acute
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| since he stopped smoking. |
| Chesterfield, his brand of choice, provided the
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| finance for The Stolen Jools, and he and Babe generated some income by
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| advertising Old Gold cigarettes, although he could never smoke Old Gold himself.
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| Either way, the tobacco companies made their money back from him a thousand
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| times over, and now his is an old man smelling the world anew
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| Lois, his daughter, calls him on the telephone. |
| He enjoys hearing from her,
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| and loves spending time with his grandchildren. |
| He could, perhaps,
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| have tried fro more children of his own, but he chose not to. |
| His daughter is
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| to be his sole such blessing
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| Ida says that she always knows when Lois is on the other end of the telephone.
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| He does not even have to speak her name. |
| Ida can hear it in his voice,
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| and see it in the expression on his face
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| Before I die, Ida sometimes says, I wish I could witness that expression on
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| your face just once when I call. |
| If your tone is anything to go by,
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| your face won’t look like it does when you hear from Lois
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| He always hushes her. |
| If he is an a bad mood, he tells her that she sounds like
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| Anita Garvin
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| Or Vera, although he only thinks this and never utters it aloud
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| He will die soon. |
| He knows this on some animal level. |
| He does not mind dying.
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| He is not afraid. |
| He will miss his daughter, and he will miss Ida,
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| but he is now discarding days like small bills until all are spent,
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| disposing of the hours by writing letters and waiting for strangers to call.
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| He is excited by new deliveries of stationary with the Oceana letterhead.
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| In another life, he might have been content to run a stationary store,
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| with ascending grades of material from the cheapest to the finest,
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| and even the poorest stored carefully to preserve it from damp stains.
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| He retains a small stock of expensive cotton paper, which he uses sparingly.
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| He admires the randomness of the watermark it bears, so that no two sheets are
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| alike
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| He has always been ambivalent about unpredictability, about disorder.
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| He tried to impose order upon his life, and failed. |
| He resisted the imposition
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| of order upon his art, and succeeded. |
| In both spheres of his existence,
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| he ultimately embraced chaos
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| These are the subjects about which he thinks, when he is alone at the Oceana
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| Apartments
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| He is not sad about the imminence of mortality. |
| He feels that the purposeful
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| part of his existence ended many years ago, and the best part of it concluded
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| with Babe’s death. |
| He has never been a particularly religious man.
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| He and Babe had this in common. |
| Reincarnation appeals to him, but only if he
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| can retain some memory of the mistakes that he has made in this life and
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| therefore only if he can retain some memory of Babe
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| He does not trust in reincarnation alone to reunite him with Babe.
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| He does not trust in reincarnation alone to reunite him with Babe.
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| He does not trust in reincarnation alone to reunite him with Babe.
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| He does not trust in reincarnation alone to reunite him with Babe.
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| Fate, perhaps, but not reincarnation, because it was fate that brought them
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| together, these lives entwined like lovers' limbs |