He sat in the dark gazing out the front door, his brown eyes lit up by the lamp in the corner, his mind on something distant. Who knows what a dog thinks when he sits quietly, his eyes barely blinking, his body still. And who knows why.
I sat in the room beneath the light of the lamp in the corner, a book in my lap recounting Machiavellian observations and Borgian horrors at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. It was slow going, that reading—death, deceit, treachery, mayhem. We have come oh so far since then.
And with that, I set the book down and stood up and limped over to another lamp to brighten the room and keep the two of us from gazing rummaging about in our dark thoughts. And I came in here and read the news of bombing raids and tsunamis and nuclear power plants on the bring, something that contributed frankly nothing to my effort to brighten the room.
And then the fair and industrious Trudy came home.