plus

In the meantime, we ate an awful lot of pies. Three a week at one point. We always sipped tea with it, and he always seemed to find topics for engaging, if somewhat one-sided, conversation. He told me about his grandfather’s dementia. The poor old man was now confusing the details of his own life with those he had read in some biographies of Charles Lindbergh. He told me about his old Latin teacher who chainsmoked and who, one day, soon after retiring, put on a flowered sundress plus a wig, then hanged himself in his study. Maybe he was trying to convince me that he had a stomach for strange stories? Was it the pie or the silence that eased these stories out of him?

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