If one lives long enough — which may mean years or merely the duration of a single sleepless night measured not by clocks but by the repeated recognition that what one believed had ended has only withdrawn beyond the next bend of consciousness to await its own inevitable return — there comes at last the realization that every room into which one enters has already been occupied by one’s former selves, by the youth who mistook desire for destiny and the older man who would aft

There had been, before either of them could have known that memory itself is forever conspiring against the sequence of events it pretends merely to preserve, an evening whose darkness did not so much descend upon the little park as seep upward from the earth itself, enfolding the benches, the trees, the hesitant gestures of two people seated side by side until the whole world seemed suspended in that peculiar hour when the last certainty of daylight relinquishes its claim an

For decades, the standard baby-boomer position on tattoos was admirably consistent: they were for Popeye, his rival Bluto and WWII sailors who’d “seen things,” bikers named Snake, carnival workers who guessed your weight for a dollar, and inmates with homemade chess sets and a suspiciously detailed knowledge of homemade shivs. Then something happened. The post-war generation that embraced free love, acid and disco while disdaining tattoos as a sign of poor judgment has finall