It was a crisp, fall day in 1981 and my brother Steve and I were searching our grandparents’ basement for Grandpa’s severed thumb. We were frantic, not because he needed to reattach it but because he promised a fifty-cent piece to whoever brought it back to him.

If you care about your image, dying should scare you to death. For years, the final moment of our lives has been glorified as some serene, almost beautiful process: we die peacefully then cut-scene and bam—tux, flowers, funeral. Nothing in-between.

The first thing he did was ask me on a date. It was in the bitter cold of a California winter, and the mall was decorated with all kinds of winter festivities. I could hear the sounds of steel blades scratching the ice behind me as little children attempted to push their feet forward on the foreign temporary terrain.

It is a family legend that my great-great granduncle Ezekiel used to go on fishing trips with his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the end of which, Waldo—he preferred the name Waldo to Ralph, if you can believe it—inevitably dragged my relative to a local brothel (no one in my family believes this, but still).

A tin-plated nonsense came up over the hill on spindly legs and entered our village at a stately pace.  Our village, having never seen such a thing, crowded the visitor, eager for a chance to benefit from its peculiar form of smarts.  Presently, the crowd around the figure thickened so that its stilts now acted as posts sunk into the earth.  Its immobility was all the better for the onlookers to worship it, and although skeptics existed, they were shouted down by the others.  The nonsense itself, now robbed of the ability to execute its gawky walk, it preferred, I thought, not to make itself a target of ridicule.  It stayed in our village thereafter.