When he was a young man he eschewed fiction, thinking that reality was all that mattered. But working at that wheel he had the time to remember the stories he’d read and somehow came to the realization that the novel was the only way a human being could truly express the lives he experienced. “Lives, not life?” Katrina asked. “If you live long enough,” Clarence explained, “you take on many personas. I’ve gone from sharecropper to revolutionary to scribbler in my seventy-nine years.” “You seem so much younger,” my flirtatious wife chimed. “I notice you didn’t mention ‘father’ in your list of
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