It is a bright cold January morning on Harris Creek. It is a new year, a year that is yet to be lived, a chapter that is yet to be written and read. As I sit here in my hermitage in my sixty-third chapter, it seems to me that the proceeding chapter marked a turning point in the story. My protagonist is now clearly seen as an "old man." The author and the audience see him that way, and that is the way he sees himself; "it is written."

At some point in the story the dynamic shifts from composition to decomposition; from construction to deconstruction. One can resist the shift and focus on maintennance and reconstruction projects, or one can turn one's focus upon the disintegration, upon the inevitable. It is this turning of his eye that turns the man into the old man. "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

An old man is a useless man. He just sits in shade and watches the useful, watches and remembers. There is no future for an old man; his future has become his past. The chapters that proceed the turning point can, in an old man's eye, be re-written/re-read by the light of the moon. This recollection in reflection is something only an old man can do.