The only place we've been together in flesh and blood is at Readercon, and I had the impression of standing with you outside some room with chairs, and you saying those words. I could hear your voice so clearly in my head.

Thank you. I never know how the words I write sound to other people when I do not speak them. I'm glad they come through.

The story of Phineas Gage scares me, and the sleeping half of his face in that daguerreotype also scares me.

They do not scare me, because what I learned originally about Phineas Gage—I must have been in first or second grade, although I did not know until last year that his skull was in Boston—was a horror story, a man whose personality was so radically altered after the tamping iron went through his brain that his friends considered him unrecognizable and he was never really a functional adult again. Now I know that for years afterward he was a stagecoach driver in Chile, which is not a job a severely brain-damaged person would have been able to hold down, physically or socially. He worked in a livery stable in New Hampshire, on a farm in California. Maybe he did become someone else, but the someone else he became had a life and a livelihood and a face that makes me think of Odin, who traded an eye for wisdom. That's not fearful to me, but something of hope.

Tonight I was talking with people who heard them fall. The life guard at the town beach saw them fall.

That is very strange.