Good-bye Mr. Vonnegut. I know you didn’t believe in heaven, or if you did, it was a place oddly without value, replete with angelic children and old Nazis playing shuffleboard together. But I believe that heaven is where we point our sails and hence I see you with Mark Twain, the two of you on a veranda overlooking the Hudson river, and you are enjoying the telling of an intricate story, the kind that goes forward like a disreputable wagon train that has been forced out of town by an untoward event that took place at yesterday’s circus and the likes of which the locals had never seen before and which in turn the circus folk will tell again and again, and the story will become variously clouded and ill suited to the demands of memory and that will make it better and better. I see you both smoking good cigars. I hope you tell Mr. Twain the joke which ends with the punch line: "Hold onto your hats, we could end up miles from here."
Oh, and Mr. Vonegut. Get Twain to tell you once again, and out loud his respective diaries of Adam and Eve. Ask him to introduce you to them by and by. They will, I think, look strangely like people from Indiana. Oh, and say hi to Kin Hubbard and the other free thinkers out there. Remind them please that us terrestrials will never forget them.
S.K.
You’ll appreciate these posts as well…
Why There Are Any Bluebirds Left I Don’t Know
Planet of the Blind 
I don’t know if you’ve read “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian” – Vonnegut may not have believed in heaven, but he sure could imagine up a good one.
LikeLike