You knew your father had been having heart problems. Of course, you knew that.  But you had not been paying enough attention—not the right kind of attention—to factually comprehend just how critical his condition might have become. In the year following your mother’s death, you were aware that he was paying ever-lessening attention to what she had hopefully called her “heartful, healthful” advice regarding his diet. And he had slacked off his previous daily walking routines and even stopped his weekly bowling league participation. The only “exercise” he maintained was related to sporadic backyard carpentry projects plus haphazard lawn mowing and garden weeding. When that phone call came early in the morning on the day after The Day in Question, you were unprepared—not “ready” in any way—to deal with its potential realities.

The hospital staff had not relied on the abilities of Ma Bell’s creamy-throated telephone operators to ransack reams of updated white page directories in search of nicknamed subscribers. It would not have been productive anyway, since back then the telephone service for you and your housemates was maintained in the name of Michael only, the oldest of your group, the one who had found the house and negotiated its rental. And he had taken care earlier in the current semester to have the number changed after a harassing phone call from the parents of one of Kent’s unhappy girlfriends. But no, the admitting nurse had tracked you down with the combined assistance of the University of Oregon’s Dean of Student Affairs and its Director of Public Relations. Yes, but of course, there would be someone in their offices who somehow did maintain current contact information about one Nicolas “Sonny” Rooks. Their files may even have included photographs documenting the last two years of your extracurricular campus activities—nonviolent though certain highly publicized protest demonstrations you attended might have been.

When the telephone had rung early on the morning of June 18^th, you had little motivation to answer it. Exhausted physically, messed up mentally following the ordeal at the draft induction center in Portland the day before, you had crashed on the mattress in your basement bedroom around one o’clock after getting back to Eugene on the Greyhound a little after midnight. Between twelve-thirty and one, you smoked marijuana and drank Rainier beer alone while listening to bootlegged Dylan on the tiny and tinny portable stereo your parents had given you as a high school graduation gift. You found out only the next day that earlier that night all your roomies had gone up to the Student Union Fishbowl to watch live closed-circuit television coverage of what was reliably known—not that much—about what had really happened to President Johnson. After a few minutes, you had turned off Dylan to more carefully read and reread awful accounts of U.O. President Johnson’s apparent suicide in the afternoon Eugene Register-Guard and in an unprecedented nighttime distribution of a special edition of the Oregon Daily Emerald—“extra, extra, read all about it!”—while trying unsuccessfully to calm down from the horrible news, hoping to adjust to it, deal with it, unwind from it. And not just the material about Charles Johnson, but the material as well about an unnamed “graduating senior who confronted the President and disrupted the Commencement ceremony two days ago.”

When you finally fell asleep—passed out—your stunned sense of what had happened and what it might mean was unclear. You did know at least one thing: you had not fully recovered emotionally from the experience of the draft induction physical you had endured during the previous afternoon. So, when you heard the 7:00 a.m. ringing from the floor above your bedroom, you were willing to let it ring and ring and ring . . . and keep on ringing . . .  Once the fact got wedged into your head that it was not an alarm clock, that it was really the telephone, you were hoping to return to groggy sleep and assume it would be okay to be unconcerned about who might be calling.

Sweetser was the one who had finally answered it. The Kid. And reawakened you. Kept saying it was important. Claimed it was very important. You tried to beg off. You told The Kid you were too drained to deal with any calls. Whatever it was, it could wait. Unless it was Zeke Babcock, the draft counselor, waiting for an update regarding what had transpired up in Portland, and maybe even then . . . You turned over and burrowed your Jesus-bearded face deeper into wrinkled white sheets and multicolored quilts.

“But wait, Sonny,” Sweetser said, shoving his cowboy hat back to scratch his knotted curls, “I think it’s what you really call urgent. Really urgent. Sonny, I think it’s something to do with your father. I think it’s a hospital nurse saying she must get in touch with you right away.”

That last sentence was an ax aimed at your chest. You started to your feet so fast your head butted hard against The Kid’s rodeo belt buckle—knocking him against a precarious board-and-milk-crate bookcase, spilling record albums and paperback books and college coursework onto the musty concrete floor. “Excuse me, Kid,” you muttered.  “Sorry.” Your head didn’t hurt from the impact with the big metal buckle—didn’t hurt any more, that is, than it had been hurting already. (Or maybe it just hurt differently.)  You gave your skull a couple of cobweb-clearing shakes, high-stepped the sudden pile at your ankles, and scampered in bare feet up splintery steps to the telephone.

 In your daze and panic, you understood very little of what the woman on the other end of the line was trying to explain. She was trying to provide too many details—more than your fuzzy mind could easily handle. Something about a heart problem—some form of attack—and “cabbage.” That didn’t make sense. Your father hated cabbage—had created a scene one Thanksgiving when your mother tried to prepare it according to some Iberian “traditional” recipe. But you understood enough of what the disembodied voice was saying to know that consideration of some sort of profound medical procedure was imminent and that you had better get your sorry self over to Sacred Heart as soon as possible if you wanted a chance to talk with somebody before the carving started.

A woman in white at a wooden desk asked you your name. After you had mumbled “Nicolas Rooks,” she asked you, with a voice calm and polite, to prove it.  You complied without inferring insult. As you were putting your Oregon driver’s license and your U.O. 1969 student identity card back into your wallet, she handed you another wallet. A decade and a half old now, it was easy for you to recognize it, even though the dark leather hide was more distressed—showing more cracks—than you had noticed in the past on those occasions when he had removed it from the hip pocket of his habitual “dress” slacks to pay a restaurant bill. The woman in white told you that the first thing the critical response team had seen when they flipped the wallet open was the Emergency Contact card. Sliding a red and rounded fingernail under a metal clip, she loosened a small pasteboard rectangle from some carbon-papered pages dense with typescript and written scrawls. You could smell the scented words—acrid jottings, hastily scribbled. Doctors’ notes.  Admittance lingo. Blood Press. Temp. Plus the admitted patient’s name fuzzily typed at the top: Manfred J. Rooks.

“The doctor will explain what happened—answer your questions if . . .”

You nodded numbly.

“And there will probably be some routine . . . paperwork—permissions, authorizations, and so forth.”

You nodded numbly.

“Your father is sedated right now—will likely remain . . . unconscious . . . for another hour or more. But you are certainly allowed, if you wish, to sit quietly in the room with him while we wait for Dr. Bradmore. He’s finishing up with another emergency admission but will be here shortly for you to . . . consult.”

You nodded numbly.

Though you were not sure whether she was a medically trained nurse or was performing only an administrative clerical role, this woman in white with the blood-red fingernails had seemed thoroughly “professional,” and even “congenial,” as she placed a paper clip between her lips and offered you a card now separated from the carbon-papered set of admittance notes. You thanked her and took it, turning it over and over in unsteady hands. Still white but flaking around the edges, it felt lighter to your fingers than you thought it should have. You stared at it for several seconds before placing it carefully into the pocket of your flannel shirt, hyperaware as you did so of how hard your own heart, one generation younger than his, was beating.

When your father had first unfolded his new wallet after taking it out of the crayoned “Merry Christmas” paper you had made in the second grade (complete with little pictures of spiky trees and oval ornaments), the emergency contact card was hiding in the place where a dollar bill would have been if you had not spent the last of your scant saved-up allowance for the wallet itself. (For a gift from you, your mother had to settle that year for a houseplant obtained from Grandma Georgia’s backyard greenhouse in Quicksap.) He examined this Christmas wallet carefully, empty except for the card, which he removed and studied momentarily (both sides) before twitching his forehead interrogatively and extending his arm to offer it to your mother, reaffirming her delegation to take care of such things. You remember vividly how bright the white corners appeared against the naturally tanned skin of her accepting fingers.

In your mother’s house, such spaces on that kind of card would not long have remained unfilled. It was likely that she had supplied the information that very Christmas Eve. At least within the week. By New Year’s Day, for certain. She would not have delayed it longer.

To admit you felt “tense” within the walls of a patient’s room inside Eugene’s Sacred Heart Hospital, the site of your own birth, would woefully understate matters. As you sat a few feet from your father’s bed, on a metal chair with a pathetically flattened and threadbare “cushion,” the muscles in your legs seemed as flexible as the two-by-fours you used to pull in your father’s sawmill. Your deceptively praiseworthy posture was as straight as a post only because stress had stiffened your spine. You did not feel capable of comfortably leaning forward even a few inches. And for most of the time that you sat staring at your “sleeping” father, the inside of your head was far less relaxed than your legs or your back.

More than once, you took the emergency contact card out of your shirt pocket and pondered it, wondering how long your father waited after your mother had died the previous year before changing the information. He hadn’t told you he had changed it. You had not even considered the possibility that he was still carrying the damn thing in this distressed wallet. A line of gray graphite had been drawn neatly across “Luiza.” Above, in replacement, was “Sonny,” in somewhat embellished cursive, unmistakably your father’s prideful Palmer Method. “Rooks” remained as originally written by your mother, although the Paper Mate blue had faded. “Wife” had given way to “my boy.” You were acutely aware that the other information was now incomplete.

You would be unable to swear with certainty—were you to be asked in a court of family law—that you had informed your father of your most recent telephone number. Nor did you recall his having requested updates, although you knew he had always kept your college residential addresses written down somewhere. She would have known the phone number, would have insisted on updates from you each time it changed, would have kept new numbers on several slips of paper that she “filed” in various nooks of her kitchen and bedroom. She would have stored it securely in her graying memory as well.

A blue breathing machine with two transparent hoses was whooshing oxygen to his nostrils. There was a small red stain on his salt-and-pepper mustache, just under the insertion point for one of the tubes. You noted an uncharacteristic stubble on his normally smooth cheeks and chin, apparently untouched by a razor for days. That stubble hadn’t been there during your Del Rey dinner on Memorial Day, the last time the two of you had been together. Even though he was “asleep,” he was definitely not relaxed. Not a bit. Not merely closed, his eyelids were cramped shut so tightly that the skin was pinched down at the corners and puffed up hard in the centers. Hanging low from a pole near his left shoulder was a plastic bag containing a small amount of vinegar-colored liquid. Surrounded by a halo of dust motes, the liquid almost glinted in the summer morning sunlight slanting in through the slats of the Venetian blinds behind the bed.

The woman in white had said you were “allowed” to “sit quietly” in the room with him. “Quietly,” you decided, was not a synonym for “silently.” You decided further that you wanted to “stand up” and “speak out”—quietly—hoping that, sedated or not, asleep or not, having fully healed eardrums or not, perhaps, maybe, just possibly, he might be able to hear at least a few of your offered words. You arose from the metal chair, took one stride to the edge of his bed, and began to whisper.

Dad, I hope you can hear me. This is Sonny. Nicolas. Your boy. I love you, Dad. I’m sorry that I have not always acted in such a way as to . . . make that clear. I’m still not sure what happened—why you are here. But I’m here too. With you. I’ll be here as long as they let me stay. In a few minutes I will be talking with your doctor—the one that will be treating you . . . taking care of your medical needs . . . helping you feel better.

Like I said, all I know is that the nurse out there said something happened to your heart yesterday. I was away all day in Portland—didn’t get back until way late. The hospital didn’t . . . track me down . . . until early this morning—my fault, I confess. I guess I didn’t give you all the information you needed to keep your Emergency Contact Card . . . current.

A sudden shuddering took his shoulders. It continued down his chest. A bit of a hump above his waist bounced under the cotton gown. (He’d been gaining weight—indulging daily in his favorite dessert ice creams since your mother was no longer there to keep an eye on his diet.)

A hoarse moaning escaped dry and clamped lips. A ghostly groan. He was trying to move. You leaned closer, awkwardly and painfully. An I-V line leapt loose—almost skimmed your face and then dangled down by the dusty toes of your work boots. You shifted back quickly, as though stung by a snake or threatened by a bee, and turned your head toward the rattling door. The woman in white was already there.

“Dr. Bradmore will see you now.”

“He . . .  he’s . . . just now he tried . . .”

“Yes, I know. I was watching the monitor. I’ll take care of him for now. You go ahead. The doctor is waiting for you in the conference room I showed you earlier. I’ll stay with your father until you . . .” She retrieved the I-V and did something with it. You were too upset to grasp the implications of what she was saying and doing.

“Here, have a seat.” The doctor strode across the carpeted floor with right hand extended. He quickly gave you a short (not quite grim) smile.

It was not a conventional waiting room. A painted poster on the back of the open door proclaimed this place to be a “Family Friendly Area.” You took it to be a room where friends of someone going under the knife could huddle and commiserate in relative privacy while awaiting medical updates. An unoccupied sofa sat at one end of the rectangular room; a silent television set playing a black-and-white “Flintstones” cartoon hung from the ceiling at the other. In between was a round wooden table with a checker or chessboard in the center. Judging from the positions of the red and black pieces, you assumed the two most recent players had been called away to attend to something more important without either having gained an advantage.

After shaking your hand, he substituted a neutral expression for his previous version of a smile and gestured toward the sofa. “I’m Dr. Bradmore. You’re Sonny, right?”

You nodded.

“We’re going to do something for your dad we cardiologists have started calling a ‘cabbage.’ Is that a term you’re familiar with?”

Dr. Bradmore was definitely older than you, but definitely younger than your father. You were not sure how much he had in common with either of you—with either of the currently surviving Rooks. You shook your throbbing head from side to side. “Not in any kind of medical sense. I don’t think you’re talking about his diet.”

Whippet thin, Dr. Bradmore was wearing a forest green jogging suit. A big lemon-yellow U.O. logo stretched across his chest. The running shoes were a lighter shade of green than the pants. He sat across from the sofa on a brightly cushioned chair and hunched toward you with his forearms resting across his thighs and his hands clasped. (In prayer?) His voice was as professionally earnest as a voice can be, though not especially “warm.”  He cleared his throat quietly. “Well, no, nothing to do with your dad’s diet, not directly—although you and I may end up talking about his diet before we’re all done with this thing. It’s just one of those funny little acronyms: CABG, ‘cabbage’—much easier than saying Coronary Artery Bypass Graft.”

His enunciation was strong and distinct, as though to set the words in stone. You had no trouble hearing them. You now knew what the words meant. You wondered what Dr. Bradmore meant. His eyes were hard to see behind the thick lenses of his glasses. They were not the Russian Revolution style of spectacles with steel rims you had been sporting ever since seeing Doctor Zhivago during your freshman year. No, these were more functionally utilitarian than yours, the kind designed to prevent injuries to the eyes of athletes. Or to safety-conscious surgeons?

“When we’re done, the other members of the surgery team and me, your dad will look like he has a big zipper down the front of his chest. It’ll be a nice big scar, a real souvenir. The question is always whether it will be worth the tradeoff.” Dr. Bradmore stroked a short dark goatee once or twice, then straightened up and clapped a hand on your shoulder. “I think it will be. His heart will work much better than it’s working today—better than it’s been working for quite a while now. I’ve already spoken by phone with your dad’s primary physician out in Florence. Apparently, he’s had . . . mixed results . . . trying to . . . wean himself from those regular helpings of after-dinner desserts, notably generous helpings of chocolate-chip ice cream on top of a slice of cherry pie. And other things too—all that red meat during dinner . . . You know—given his apparent weight gain, according to Dr. Lamm, and some signs of thickening in his arteries, et cetera. Now that he’s cooking for himself.” Dr. Bradmore paused and once again rhetorically cleared his throat. “This is a vast . . . oversimplification . . . of course. Here’s what I mean about some . . . physical contributors . . . to what likely led up to his . . .”  Dr. Bradmore waggled one hand uncertainly. “And what we are about to now attempt to . . .”

You nodded wordlessly and paid appropriate attention.

Within the hour you had signed all the necessary paperwork. The woman in white told you she had some good news. “Your father kept current on a comprehensive medical insurance plan he qualified for as a Naval veteran of World War II.” But Dr. Bradmore had some bad news. “I’m afraid I won’t want you in the room with him until the procedure is completed. The ‘cabbage’ will be performed late afternoon or early evening. We have a few hours of preparation and observation to deal with throughout the day—and he must remain in a reasonably sterile environment while we do several things that must be done. You can peek in right now for just a moment, but I recommend that you go home for now, maybe take a shower, get some lunch, get yourself a nice thick book, then come back later in the afternoon.” You peeked in. He seemed to be snoring. Dr. Bradmore said it wasn’t snoring.

Dad, I’ll be back soon. I love you, Dad.

At a certain point in the early evening proceedings, something went wrong.

A couple of minutes after the “median sternotomy” was executed to create the necessary opening in your father’s chest, and while Dr. Bradmore was examining the heart and its immediate surroundings in preparation for stitching a tube to the right atrium, he noticed an anomaly—what appeared to be a tiny piece of metal.

“Tiny?” Slightly bigger and not as rounded compared to the head of an old-fashioned pushpin your teacher from the first grade, Mrs. Kost, would have used to affix little sheets of crayon art to the cork bulletin boards around the room in preparation for an open house in early autumn for parents.

“Tiny?” So small, Dr. Bradmore repeated several times to you afterwards, that none of the preliminary exams and scans had been able to detect it. Could have been embedded there in heart muscle for years and years, he guessed. Without having caused any problems.

But something eventually did go wrong.

Dr. Bradmore intended to extract that tiny piece of whatever it was from your father’s heart; and extract it, finally, he did. As he worked, employing the magnetic tip of a specialized surgical instrument that resembled nothing so much as a slender screwdriver, two things became known: whatever this unexpected object was, it definitely contained metal; whatever it was, this unexpected metal object was a little longer and a little wider than it had seemed to his lens-protected eyes at first observation.  It was just long enough and wide enough and thin enough to allow for the possibility of a bit of “bending” or “warping.” It was not purely “straight.” When Dr. Bradmore showed it to you later, using a very expensive and very powerful microscope with an IBM logo on its base, he claimed the edge of the mysterious metal specimen had been “chipped.”

“Chipped?” Unlike the surface of a new Super Blue Blade for Gillette Safety Razors as usually used by your father and as advertised Friday nights in the ‘fifties on NBC’s Cavalcade of Sports—that blade championed by cream-cheeked athletes claiming how effectively it could hold its smooth edge throughout many, many shaves—yes, unlike that commercially successful example of modern industrial engineering, the edge on this tiny and mysterious metallic specimen was, by comparison, “jagged.”

You now believe it was a thin fragment from a padlock or key that might have been blown off the front of a metal storage locker containing prescription medicines for sailors aboard the USS Colorado. Your father had once—only once—hinted to you that some “shrapnel event” such as that had occurred near him during a South Pacific battle with a Japanese warship.

While Dr. Bradmore was extracting it, an invisible “end” or “edge” seemed to “snag” or “get stuck” somewhere below the surface of your father’s heart. Dr. Bradmore became cautious. He consulted his colleagues, Dr. Cleff and Dr. Longe. He wondered aloud—his tones muffled, no doubt, by the protective layer of his face mask—if it would be better to leave the little bit of metal where it had apparently resided in relative comfort for maybe twenty-plus years.

Except, pointed out Dr. Cleff (according to Dr. Longe later), it was no longer in the same place where it may have become “relatively comfortable.” That was a good point, agreed Dr. Longe (according to Dr. Cleff later), emphasizing that whatever solid anchor it may have had before now was likely no longer there—meaning this peculiar little thing could continue to move. And that might not be a positive tendency.

Consensus was established. The prevention of unintended consequences that could be caused by future internal migrations of this unexpected artifact became a top priority as part of preparation for completion of the cabbage.

But something definitely did go wrong.

You never believed it was proper to blame Dr. Bradmore. Or Dr. Cleff. Or Dr. Longe. Dr. Bradmore just happened to be the surgeon assigned by fate to have his finger and thumb on the fulcrum end of that magnetic-tipped instrument. As he teased it back slowly to loosen the apparent “snag,” and as the tiny fragment came “unstuck,” Dr. Bradmore was reminded suddenly (he admitted later) of a tiny cork coming out of an overturned miniature bottle of aged Merlot.

He handed the expensive screwdriver, its little prize attached, to Dr. Cleff and immediately began calling for sponges and clamps from Dr. Longe. At first, the flowing liquid consisted of only two minutely thin rivulets. Probably not a big deal. But the infinitesimal “slit” left behind by the removal of the little piece of metal was a tiny bit wider or longer than anyone would have predicted or could have expected. The rivulets widened into a thicker tributary. Perhaps a big deal.

After a judicious delay of an hour and forty-five minutes, Dr. Bradmore felt confident that the sponges and clamps were staunching the invisible source of the little wound. After verifying that the flow of somewhat rusty liquid had stopped, had coagulated effectively, he finally nodded to Dr. Cleff and Dr. Longe to signal that it was time to proceed with the cabbage itself. Each nodded back.

After they had zipped up your father’s chest and arranged to have him moved to an intensive care recovery room, only one of the three still had unblotted perspiration on his forehead as he prepared to change his clothes and drive home to get some needed rest. You were advised to do likewise—get some rest at home and return first thing in the morning. “Dr. Longe will wait here through the night. He will call me, and I will call you if anything happens that you need to know about. I have your number in my wallet.”

At some point in the middle of the night, however, at some point estimated to be 3:13 a.m., the hidden wound beneath the zippered chest, unaccountably close to the surface of the right atrium, apparently became “unstaunched.” Although the cabbage procedure itself had been executed correctly—of “textbook fidelity”—the heart it supported could no longer appreciate and applaud that surgical accomplishment.  Something called “pericardial tamponade” was beginning. Despite the onset of beeps and whistles of attentive technology as the sac containing your father’s heart began to stretch unnaturally before ceasing to stretch at all, and before the weakening muscle it contained stopped flexing, a reawakened and returning Dr. Bradmore could do little more than stand and watch as your father’s bed was wheeled by Dr. Longe back to the operating room and then rather quickly wheeled away again to another room—not a recovery room. Dr. Bradmore opened his wallet and dialed your number.

Your best efforts to reconstruct the awful events yielded something plainly plausible but painfully fragmentary. While walking his new dog, Smarty, on an afternoon break from his duties at the corner store, Brock Garwood had glimpsed and heard your father out in the back yard working away on one of his seemingly innumerable (if not precisely endless) fences. During your boyhood, after your family had moved across the road to your second house in Wave, you witnessed and often helped your father build at least four different styles. This current project featured a fancy weave of thin and flexible cedar boards to replace the thicker cantilevered style he had put up two summers earlier. Between the thudding of the hammer and the whining of the saw, Brock said there were intervals of clearly audible country-and-western songs, news bulletins, sports scores, weather reports, and assorted commercial announcements. He had been surprised when the radio sounds continued into the late afternoon, well after the hammering and sawing had ceased. “To tell the truth,” he told you later—shortly before the funeral—“I was getting a little annoyed. I had thought he had the volume up extra loud so he could hear the announcer over the noisy tools. But after those noises had settled down, I was thinking about stretching out in a shady hammock for a beer or a bit of a nap and the sound of that radio was becoming a major distraction. So, I just moseyed over there thinking I would ask your dad if he could turn it down a hair—and was surprised to find the transistor lying in the shrubs, going pretty close to full blast, with no sign of him and no sign of his car in the driveway.”

It had been tuned, of course, to KUGN out of Eugene, his favorite station: the one that carried the Ducks’ football games live in the autumn and their basketball contests in the winter, the one that carried NBC radio news specials at irregular times on the weekends, the one that interrupted its various popular music formats whenever there was a breaking story of interest to Oregonians within its Willamette Valley “Emerald Empire” listening area.

You had suspected—and later verified from the KUGN log books, courtesy of one of your friends from a U.O. acting class who was working as a station intern—that several times that day your father’s favorite station had broadcast the news that Charles E. Johnson had driven his Volkswagen head-on into a logging truck and had not survived.  In some of these news reports (although Murph could not tell from the log books if all), the radio script for KUGN news readers included references to “the University President’s having been greatly upset by the disruption of Sunday’s Commencement ceremony by one of the graduating seniors, who took over the platform and delivered a protest speech.”  In none of these broadcasts had a KUGN announcer identified this graduating senior by name or described precisely what he had done—what you and all others in attendance witnessed: a tall man, apparently African-American, in green cap and gown, suddenly, swiftly, “secretly,” all alone, all by himself, sneaking up the back stairsteps to emerge onto the speaker’s platform and intercept President Johnson on his way to the lectern, conferring with the president in muffled voices that whispered out over the microphone—something about requesting permission (“Permission to what?”), wanting to say a few words (“Regarding what topic?”), and apparently securing the requested permission as Charles E. Johnson took a few steps backward and gestured toward the lectern  (“. . . my guest”), then Mose stepping back himself and saying something too quiet to hear and then the president stepping forward again to say into the microphone that a graduating senior had been given permission to say a few words to his classmates.

It was more than a few, but not as many as President Johnson would articulate later. Mose began by stating “We are all guilty.” He then enumerated several ways in which his captive audience might evaluate his accusations of racism, cultural insensitivity, economic selfishness, war-mongering willingness to . . .

You began to lose track of his individual words. Although undeniably passionate and mostly logical—though likely excessively idealistic—and in certain ways hard to argue with, Mose’s train of thought lost its way in the fog of your stunned consciousness . . . Your Big Opportunity, Golden or Rusty or otherwise, was gone, had been rendered irrelevant—or maybe just embarrassingly redundant. When you were once again on speaking terms—soon, you hoped—your father would have no need to admonish you again about the “bad sportsmanship of piling on.”

Your ears seemed to be gradually shutting down as Mose continued, but your lens-corrected eyes were keenly focused like microscopes, with the aid of your father's binoculars, on the specimen president, the folds of his robes floating in the wind, the sections covering his shoulders threatening to lift and flutter like blue wings. To fly him away? To where? To somewhere more peaceful than a college campus during wartime? When it came his turn to talk, his voice was not strong, but neither was it weak; it was clear enough and calm enough to say the somewhat conventional things he apparently had decided to say, regardless of the distracting sounds of scattered boos from some of the graduating seniors following Mose Kidd's departure from the platform, having first shaken hands with the U.O. president. All you remember with certainty was that your president posed a pondering question along the lines of “Do you wonder what type of citizen you will find that you have become twenty or thirty years from today?”

You wish that Charles E. Johnson were here today to debate some answers to that truly foresighted question.

Based on the relationship between the departure time estimated by Brock Garwood and the admitting records at Sacred Heart Hospital, you believe that your father must have driven extremely slowly and carefully the many miles from Wave to Eugene. Later, when you retrieved his car from the Eugene police department (it had been towed from a no parking zone near the entrance to the emergency wing), you checked the location of the dial on the car radio and concluded that he must have heard that devastating newscast about a graduating senior he assumed was you way too many times before he arrived.