Don't mean to make this into a morbid evening, but I keep thinking about people lost - particularly my uncle Jim, cousin Vicki, and Conor Lynch, the 16-year-old high school student who was killed in a hit-and-run a half mile from my house just two days ago.

This is Richard Ford, the closest to an American Shakespeare of Ordinary Life that we'll ever get. From Independence Day.

(He has stopped at a motel for the night and stood next to a trucker, "Mr. Tank," and watched as the body of a family man was brought out of another room in "a long plastic bag that looks like it should hold a set of golf clubs... lumpy from the body inside." Shortly after, he sees "the young blue-dressed wife who's in turn holding the small hand of a tiny blond girl, who looks apprehensively all around in the dark and back behind her into the room she's left... she's wearing neat little yellow shorts and tennies with white socks, and a hot-pink pullover that has a red heart on the front like a target. She is slightly knock-kneed... she's led across the lot to an unmarked vehicle that will take her and her mother elsewhere, to some other Connecticut town, where a terrible-awful thing hasn't happened. There, to sleep.")

"And as I lie in bed here, still alive myself... I try to find solace against the way this memory and the night's events make me feel, which is: bracketed, limbo'd, unable to budge, as illustrated amply by Mr. Tanks and me standing side by side in the murderous night, unable to strike a spark, utter a convincingly encouraging word to the other, be of assistance, shout halloo, dip a wing; unable at the passage of another human to the barren beyond to share a hope for the future. Whereas, had we but been able, our spirits might've been lightened.

Death, veteran of death that I am, seems so near now, so plentiful, so oh-so-drastic and significant, that it scares me witless...

Suddenly my heart goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if I myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if I could, I would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, 'It's okay. I got away. It was goddamnded close, I'll tell ya. It didn't get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But I made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do.' only there's no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry."

\ \ \ \ x / / / /

My Money's on Rex