A seventy-year-old author handed a copy of his book

as a gift to a seventy-year-old buddy.

The friend saw the photo on the back cover and joked

that the woman in the photo was

aging better than the author who stood beside her in the photo.

The author said that the woman was

his daughter, and in that instant, the author wondered if his buddy

thought that was his late wife.

The two men stood in the infinity of awkward silence and then joked

their way out of the never-to-be-

spoken-of moment. Later, the author wondered if his friend had lapsed

into fleeting forgetfulness and

saw the woman who definitely would look better than the author, if

only because she stopped aging at forty-nine.