, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight.

I was at the cash-register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit
behind me tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sorry to bother you," he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure
and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. "I was just wondering where you
found that." He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat
wood-burned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill,
thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction.

"Second floor, in the toy section."

"There wasn't anything else like it, was there?"

"'Fraid not," I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in
newspaper.

"Ah," he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he
couldn't have a puppy. "I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?"

I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my
stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store,
and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door
by the elbow of his expensive suit.

"How much?" I had paid a dollar.

"Ten bucks?"

I nearly said, "Sold!" but I caught myself. "Twenty."

"Twenty dollars?"

"That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street."

He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke.
His face lit up like a lightbulb.

#

It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my
childhood was particularly happy.

There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My
grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank
out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as
my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled
lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.

There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his
wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the
twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures:
crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away
places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair once, and a
lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves.

Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel,