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Gathering the Threads of History
History is nothing more than a thin thread of what is remembered stretched out over an ocean of what has been forgotten.
—MILAN KUNDERA
I am working on a short essay about a strange summer I had when my brother worked for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, running tests on water samples that had been held up for years. He drove a tiny, two-seater Fiat Spider, the car of choice that year. My start: “It’s my brother’s Spider summer. Not dog days but spider days. My brother has a blue Fiat Spider. It has no backseat but I ride in the back anyway, rolled up in the ten inches or so under the rear window. Spiders aren’t much more than human-sized tins so this is risky but it doesn’t matter. Let ...
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