We don’t know how we made the mistake. It’s a long way from a cesspool man to some women behind a screen door selling honey.

We think it’s amusing and so do they. We laugh at ourselves and they laugh at us. We are funny and drive away talking about the inner and outer roads that a man travels down to arrive at owning a grocery store or being a doctor or knowing cesspools intimately or how somebody else decides to sell honey but then is mistaken for a cesspool man.

A short, humorously spiritual distance away we find a cesspool man who’s at home surrounded by all the equipment that he needs to successfully exercise cesspools.

Three men are fixing a broken truck. They stop working and turn to look at us. They are very serious in a country-casual way.

‘No, not today. We got to fix this truck, so we can go bear hunting.’

And that’s it and there you have it: They want to fix the truck, so they can go bear hunting. Our cesspool is transparent, child-like. Bears are more important. I’m glad to be back in California.

The World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane

He was found lying dead near the television set on the front room floor of a small rented house in Los Angeles. My wife had gone to the store to get some ice cream. It was an early-in-the-night-just-a-few-blocks-away store. We were in an ice cream mood. The telephone rang. It was her brother to say that her father had died that afternoon. He was seventy. I waited for her to come home with the ice cream. I tried to think of the best way to tell her that her father was dead with the least amount of pain but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead.

She was very happy when she came back from the store.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

‘Your brother just called from Los Angeles,’ I said.

‘What happened?’ she said.

‘Your father died this afternoon.’

That was in 1960 and now it’s just a few weeks away from 1970. He has been dead for almost ten years and I’ve done a lot of thinking about what his death means to all of us.