Now an old man comes down the street, a kind of scrawny angel, pushing a bent bicycle. The spokes flash in the sun. He’s a war veteran. Compared to him everyone else in the world is motionless.
**
Squirrel on a telephone line, I swear, he’s Jimmy Cagney.
**
Everyone loves a fairy tale, even my late father who was a rational Scandinavian academic. In my dad’s case he used to imagine creatures at the bottom of the lake, things with lots of appendages. He’d talk to them in his brand of old Finnish. It was his way of not drowning.
Planet of the Blind 