Some decades back, a Quaker named Richard Millhouse Nixon

wrote a book entitled Six Crises. An opposition psychiatrist was

quick to pick up on this title and note that President Nixon saw his

life in typically manic-depressive fashion. Psychiatry and politics and religion aside, I suspect many of us perceive our lives just as that past-President did: if not in crises, at least in watersheds where we choose one muddy river path over another; then fall onto or avoid a sunning cottonmouth; where we either sadly stumble over or gladly hop over the mighty snag of regret.

So what did Josey learn from Mr. Garner’s visit and those

untimely deaths? I’d like to say—my friend, I’d truly like to say—

that he absorbed a myriad of lessons. But he’s forever been unable to assimilate even a damned comic book moral, much less true epiphany’s inspiration. In consequence he views himself not as a higher spiritual being, not even as a genetically select, silken white rat capable of conquering life’s mazes, but rather as the world’s thinnest fat man, continually stunning crowds below by tossing off some dazzling jewel.