“You have to clap with more enthusiasm,” Martin would say after about the fourth demonstration. I’d try to clap more enthusiastically and would add: “Amazing.”

But that day, after Selma’s dream, we avoided the Uhlheck. Despite the clear blue sky, we were afraid lightning might strike us on the field, a bolt of lightning that couldn’t care less about being meteorologically impossible. We were afraid we might meet something in the forest even more dangerous than Palm, maybe a hellhound that couldn’t care less that it didn’t exist.

From the train station, we went straight to Selma’s. We felt safer there on the day after her dream. We were ten years old and afraid of deaths that could not possibly occur instead of the real one that came in through the door.

The optician was sitting at Selma’s kitchen table. He held a large leather bag on his lap and was unusually quiet. Selma bustled about, doing housework, wiping away dirt that didn’t exist.

Martin and I sat on the floor and talked the optician into playing the similarity game with us. In the similarity game we would name two things that had nothing to do with each other and the optician had to find a connection.

“Mathematics and calf’s liver,” I said.

“You have to absorb them both and neither is to your taste,” the optician said.

“What does absorb mean?” Martin asked.

“To make something a part of you,” Selma replied.

She stepped onto the kitchen bench next to the optician and brushed would-be dust from the photograph of my grandfather. Selma’s shoelace had come untied.

“A coffeepot and a shoelace,” I said. The optician thought for a moment and Selma stepped down from the bench and tied her shoe.

“Both are used first thing in the morning,” the optician explained, “and when used, they both get your heart rate going.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” Selma remarked.

“Doesn’t matter, it’s still true,” the optician said.

“A glass soda bottle and a Christmas tree,” Martin said, and the optician answered: “That one’s easy. Both are most often dark green, both whistle when people or the wind blow in them.”

Selma took a stack of leaflets and television guides from a chair to fluff up the cushion. One of the covers showed the actress who played Maggie in Selma’s series. Last week Maggie’s husband, who was severely injured from an accident, had been unplugged from the machines in the hospital. “Love and death,” I said.

“That one’s easy, too,” the optician said. “You can’t practice for either one and you can’t escape them—both will befall you.”

“What’s befall?” I asked.

“When something bowls you over,” Selma explained.