CHAPTER 13“When a cow is puking in Oklahoma, a cow is resting in Nebraska.”
-- Jack Kerouac, from Trip Trap
There is something quite unsettling about recounting to a friend the twenty years that have just passed. The wooing of a woman who is now your ex-wife appears as an inconceivable aberration of a person whose body you still inhabit yet whose feelings have become a total riddle. People who drove their cars the way he used to drive, with wheels coming to a screeching halt in front of the traffic lights, Hubert now considered stupid and asinine. And only five years before, he had picked up the habit of using his shirt pockets for coins, paper clips, and little notes. He was unable to remember the immeasurable stretch of time before, when those pockets collected nothing but lint.
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