The Floating Opera

The day progresses, the weather warming to the high eighties. Todd makes his way uptown. He passes a funeral parlor with a hearse waiting in front. A female dog leaps out of the bushes, followed by a male dog chasing after her. The male mounts the female right as a group of pallbearers come out of the parlor carrying a casket. A pallbearer kicks at the dogs, shooing them away, but the animals continue to copulate nearby, embarrassing the funeral procession. Todd muses on life and death and finds the incident amusing: “Nature, coincidence, can be a heavy-handed symbolizer. She seems at times fairly to club one over the head with significances such as this clumsy ‘life-in-the-face-of-death’ scenario, so obvious that it was embarrassing” (109). Life is full of these moments, Todd thinks, but they are merely human constructions.

Todd continues his walk. He stops again, to talk to Capt. Osborn and his elderly friends. A sign nearby reads “Life Begins at Forty” (110). The sign applies, humorlessly, to Capt. Osborn, who wants nothing more than to be younger. Todd refuses to add significance to the sign, seeing coincidences like that as too clean and

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