“I don’t feel a bit gloomy!” Nell cries. “Now that Mark and Lance have grown up and flown the coop, I am having the time of my life. I’m taking philosophy courses in the morning and working nights at Le Petit Theatre. Eddie and I have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring. To our utter amazement we discovered that we both have the same life-goal. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off.”
“That’s very good,” I say somewhat uneasily. A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.
I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values. Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can’t help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead, dead, dead.
We part laughing and dead.
Walker Percy
The Moviegoer
Galgalim 