He went in a door and out another one ten feet away. It had been an old railroad flat he had remodeled, tearing down walls and painting. He liked the two doors close together. It gave him a sense of choice otherwise missing in his aging life.

Others who had remodeled railroad flats had stupidly closed off the extra door pretending it had never existed. He drove his neighbor in a prim bungalow quite crazy when he had a whim and circled in and out of his two doors. The neighbor was a retired academic, a delightfully bright codger who loved to speak vulgarly after a lifetime of propriety. The neighbor would open a fine wine he could afford on his generous retirement and wave him over to share it. He always went, even after he joined AA to preserve his marriage. He found out that fine wine encouraged a taste for fine wine and never precipitated a binge. If you drank half a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou you wanted more of it and nothing else, certainly not the rawness of whiskey or bilious beer.

He was what they called an "award winning poet," at least that was what his publisher called him on book jackets, though in fact he had never heard of any of the awards before he received them. So much for the immortality of poetry. He had even looked up the Pulitzer in the World Almanac at a doctor's office and been quite startled to see how many twentieth-century names had been forgotten. Meanwhile over a good Bordeaux his academic geezer neighbor would say, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as if it were an obesity joke over which he chortled deeply. He himself could remember saying it in a coffee house before he flunked out of graduate school. His failure was due to "arrogance," the department chairman said. Young poets, even before they wrote a poem, tended to be prideful rather than properly self-effacing graduate students. Anyway, the department managed to grant him his master's after he published his first book of poems with an honored New York publisher. No one from the department had ever done that before. They were proud of him but not to the point where they would allow him to enroll in their Ph.D. program. Years more of him strutting the halls was an idea none of these fustian gentlemen could bear.

He and his wife weren't divorced but she lived a dozen miles out in the country outside Livingston, Montana, on a small farm with a big house. It had been her idea to get a house in town for becoming older and she was tired of taking care of such a large farmhouse of 3,800 square feet. He had also slipped on drinking which he had been able to manage in his early sixties.

He would take a chance and drive out at least twice a week and play with the dogs, often a disappointing experience because it had been quite warm and he would get there and be met wildly by the dogs but after a few minutes of play they'd settle back to sleeping on the thick grass of the lawn. He wanted them to play like they did as pups. The fact of the matter was that they were no longer pups. At ten they were about the same age in dog years as his own seventy. He slept in his studio when he came out to the farm, in a small cabin where he did his writing on the property near the big house. It wasn't elegant but simply workable.

He was taking a chance driving because he no longer had a driver's license. He had thought many times that the end of his rational marriage had come when they took his driver's license away. He was furious because it had been a mistake. He had stupidly admitted to the state cop that he had recently had spinal surgery. The cop asked if he was on narcotic pain medication and he clearly said, "No," but wasn't believed. As a matter of fact the first weeks after his surgery he had taken OxyContin but stopped despite the pain in his spine because the drug made his writing slurred and goofy. He couldn't write that way, not even in his journal which was frequently goofy all by itself.

He had also suffered from shingles for nearly three years though when the big sores subsided it was called postherpetic neuralgia. Whatever it was called it was plainly a double whammy about which nothing could be done medically. He had learned that doctors ignored shingles as an unprofitable disease until they had it themselves. There were no big fund-raisers for shingles. At the Department of Motor Vehicles office he gave a bravura performance and they kept his license when he handed it over. "Give it back," he yelled.

Anyway, he had sent the governor an imprudent letter saying that he had written Legends of the Fall, his best-known book, and he needed to drive and explore new places in order to write and make a living. He couldn't very well sit home and write "Legends of the Yard." The letter didn't do any good although eventually he proved himself deserving and was able to drive again.

He had expected the trail into aging to be uneventful. On the contrary, who had ever heard of a white, Christian gentleman like himself losing his driver's license and sitting under a pine tree rather than driving to a friendly bar in town? Which of course is what he didn't need, a bar with old friends. He hated to think of the time and energy he had spent in a long life thinking about quitting smoking and drinking for the obvious health reasons. He had intermittently, briefly of course, been a health nut in his life. Once when they still lived in Michigan he lost twenty-five pounds in two months by walking four hours every morning, stopping for a rare cigarette, counting birds he liked, walking places in the Upper Peninsula where he had never walked before. The unknown always beckons. Early settlers always wondered what was over the next hill other than other hills. The vaunted reputation of Daniel Boone came from how thoroughly he had covered the landscape. He saved a village of starving people by going out and shooting a combination of ten deer and bears in one day, enough to feed everyone for a week.

When he was growing up in Michigan, his own father had been a good woodsman and had instructed him well. When you think you're lost just sit and calm down. When you're frantic you lose your energy. Notice how the trees tend to lean a bit to the southeast. That's because of the prevailing winds and the immense storms from the northwest off Lake Superior. The day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down it had blown over ninety miles per hour for a couple of days. He had been at his remote cabin then and did not stray from the protection of its sturdy logs. He read and listened to trees crashing down in the landscape. "Widow makers," they were called. He finally left the cabin for a much needed drink at the tavern. He drove down to the lakefront and watched as giant waves smothered the pier. Even in his car he shuddered in fear. The waves actually thundered.

By far the biggest jolt of aging was the disappearance, coming up on seventy, of his sexuality. The doctor improperly joked when he explained the problem. He was angry and the doctor said that it happens to everyone. In fact there was a bench in front of the town hall on which the same five old men sat every day called "the dead pecker bench." There were medications available now, and there was a joke at the tavern that if you had an erection more than three hours just visit the Starlite Alleys on women's bowling night and announce your...