Closing Time: Those Guys

This book is divided into two parts:

Death

&

Life

The preceding has been Death.

We now enter life.

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As death was interesting, so also was life.

One early summer night in the 1950s I was on a third story sleeping porch at the home of my friend Freddie.

Several of us were sleeping out overnight on the open- to-the-sky porch.

It was late.

It was Portland.

The dark sky was absolutely clear of clouds and was also clear of numerous decades of yet to be spewed hydrocarbon haze.

The sky was alive with stars.

We were all lying on our backs in our sleeping bags looking at the stars and talking in subdued tones. The grandeur of the scene was such that even the normally boisterous children that we were had been brought to heal and reduced to whispers.

Suddenly a brilliant pinprick of light streaked across the blackness of the sky. It had gone so fast that it had looked as if it had been a line rather than a moving point.

A subdued gasp went up from the assembled watchers.

Then there was another one and another and another. We were absolutely convinced as we watched more and more of them that we were witnessing a migration of space vehicles as they trekked from some place to someplace else. We were sure that we were seeing evidence of life beyond ours. And so we went to sleep happily convinced that we were not alone in the universe.

We were glad, though - as we had all agreed - that those guys must have been a long way off and had looked to be going somewhere other than to earth.