Five days a week for forty years Uncle History went to the Glum Works at the edge of civilization and dusted the apparatus. I knew him in his last years after he’d retired. He liked nothing better than to smoke his pipe in the dark on the old porch. He seldom spoke but one fine night when the fireflies were rose from the cinnamon ferns he said: “to know the present you have to know the past; but no one wants to know the present; so I quit.”
Planet of the Blind 