I am becoming aware of the passage of time as a terrible confluence of seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into eons, until lifetimes and generations pass in what seems like instants.

It was my last day at Aetna, and Meg took the occasion of my departure to contrive a pleasant, gossipy exchange about what else, O. J. Simpson. We were discussing the length of the knife used to commit the murders and we agreed that it was indeed a very large knife – I thought of J. L. quoting the cop: "It was a substantial knife," such cop talk – and just as suddenly, as though continuing a phrase uttered about the gravity of the wounds and Nicole Simpson's nearness to decapitation, a secretary mentioned all the wonderful knives her father had given her for her new apartment: some big, some small, all very sharp, with stone sharpeners, her dad is a chef you know. And we nodded just as agreeably to the train of this conversation as to the previous one.