He saw himself in his mind's eye reading: body still, head bent, eyes moving over the black slashes of ink decorating the white paper pages. It dawned on him that he was staring at a block of wood, thinly sliced. And that the words on the page would be a meaningless secret code if it were not for his own mind conjuring a voice out them and making that voice live vividly within himself for a brief moment, the imprint of another mind desperate to share on a different block of wood, in another place and time, what it understood of life. It felt odd to think of those once-upon-a-time people who now lived forever within him, trapped in the wood except for his curiosity and never-satisfied hunger for more.

Would anyone bring his voice back?

He had every intention of jumping over the bike. But he misjudged the takeoff spot and his ankle buckled even before he got in the air. The pedal gouged his soft throat just under the jawbone and went deep. 45 years later he still remembers the sunlight and hands reaching for him to keep the blood in; the cold blue bathroom of chrome and porcelain where his mother told his father that it was deep and they would have to go to the hospital; the gurney-view of the masked doctor who said it would hurt like a big mosquito bite but it would be better after that; the kids at the ball game who pointed at the stitches he was sure would make him into Frankenstein forever; and then, eventually, the voice of a lover asking him in the dark, "What is that?"

We're sitting at breakfast when S says: It's like a completely new dimension. And I think, that's exactly what it's like. A door that opens every Tuesday morning at 8 to a world that's always been there but that I've ignored and pushed away that is now opened because I knocked, opened by a woman who is a stranger to me outside of those walls, alive and known only within. (What is that all about?) And then I think of the day in her office when my slow controlled voice broke and the facade fell for a moment and a deep sob rose up from the barrel of my body. Yeah, I say to S. That's exactly what it's like. But I know I'm still lost.

I had an escape artist's discombobulated morning. I spilled coffee all over the car dashboard but not a drop on me. I walked through an exercise class at the gym while staring at my phone, without walking into anyone or causing what would have been justified anger. I paid for the wrong parking spot at BART but didn't get a $75 ticket.

He left the kids with the sitter and got in the 2007 Avalon with magnetic flames, turned up the Zeppelin when it came on the RADIO and cruised to Costco to pick up $200 in fresh fruit, cooking oil and a $40 paper shredder.

"I AM THE MAN!" he thought as the warm wind caressed his bald head through the open window.

The two black kids on the train smoke dope in the back seats and joke about being shot and killed by the police for being "armed with weed." Everyone looks elsewhere. And he thinks, "What have we done to each other? I can't be the only one wondering."

Driving around with the window down listening to the radio this weekend somehow reminded me of an awkward 17 year-old boy with a shank of black hair and arms too long for his shirts and the afternoon he drove his sister and the French foreign exchange student, Blondine (who was tall and mature and more woman than anything he'd ever been close to and made him shy and hungry all at once) out to the horse track in a 1969 Volvo where they lost all their money on the ponies and then lurched back home in that four door box of a car only to get caught in a passing thunderstorm and the windows wouldn't roll up and the rain came in like great veils of warmth and the wipers couldn't go fast enough and two soaked girls laughed and screamed in the back seat all the way home.

I once knew a girl with an 8-track cassette of Bread's Greatest Hits. She drove a Saab and drank golden beer from plastic cups.