I open my heart to her and lay it on the table.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

Destiny, she’d learned, was written in the heavens; a person couldn’t take what the universe didn’t wish to give.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

The human heart: its expansions and contractions its electrics and hydraulics the warm tides that move and fill it. For years Art had studied it from a safe distance from many perspectives...he listened in fascination and revulsion, in envy and pity. He dispensed canned wisdom, a little scripture. He sent them on their way with a prayer.

But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.