I treated you like family.

“I use a different approach,” Sarah said. “When you’re at point a, jump to x and look for k.”

“How do I jump from one point to another?” I asked.

“How do you breathe underwater or fly in your dreams?” she replied. “Just do it; you can do anything in a dream.”

I took her excellent advice, and went on a somnambulistic adventure without even leaving the couch.

Imagine that; he survived the firebombing of Dresden then accidentally killed himself when he was eighty-four.

It seems like an appropriate demise, as deaths go. I’m sure he would have appreciated the irony of an accidental death after his botched suicide attempt decades ago. And then there’s timing.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Vonnegut observed. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”

Vonnegut loathed semicolons; he argued, “the semicolon is a transvestite hermaphrodite representing nothing at all.” In another lovely case of irony, I find Vonnegut’s jihad against semicolons amusing, especially since he argued, “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the firebombing of Dresden, and provided me with one of my three meanings of life—as well as a concise list of literary requirements—died today after a fall in his apartment. So it goes.

His mistake wasn’t dying. After all, only Matsuo knows if his heart attack came at the right time, and he’s not talking. No, his last error was to die, unnoticed, on the wrong airline.

I never thought I’d have anything positive to say about my least favorite airline, but, today I do. When a woman sitting in the back of the plane died last month on a British Airlines flight from Delhi to London, the crew moved the woman to a more comfortable seat in the first class cabin for the remainder of the flight.

Nice!

Some pundits described the move as a public relations move by British Airways, but I know better. After receiving a note from one of the airline’s flight attendants years ago, I suspect the crew was just trying to avoid the voluminous paperwork associated with a passenger’s demise.

I think I’ll choose British Airways for my last flight. Until then, though, I’ll patronize other airlines.

I took Deirdre’s good advice; I always do.

Bob Kolbrener, a real photographer, keeps telling the story (and I love it) that if one buys a camera, they are a photographer. If one buys a violin; well, they own a violin.