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   lunchtime had passed and i was four hours from dinnertime. i happened to look over to a sunbeam coming out of a south window, and there, in a pile of papers and parchment on the floor, was the ticket i had been looking for for weeks. i picked up the ticket and placed it on my desk. inside the desk drawer i went, searching for my magnifying glass. when i found the magnifying glass, i cleaned its lense with a moist towlette and placed it against the ticket. there it was! as plain as the stars in a barnyard fire – the words “janet’s way.”
   janet’s way, 1937. i had just delivered a box of tea packets to one of my clients and i was having a pipe smoke on the docks. seagulls had gathered to pick over the remains of a dog skull on the ground. i took out my pocket notebook and crossed “tea packets” off a list. the next item on the list was “mariner’s galoshes.” i wasn’t a great deliveryman but i was able to scrape by and function OK. i got on my ‘29 schwinn and rode along the pier. halfway along the pier, i stopped to make sure i had the correct amount of mariner’s galoshes in my satchel. a man against a wall, wearing a striped shirt and dirty painter’s pants, approached me and asked for the time. i told him i didn’t have a watch. he told me the only reason he asked is because the sun stopped working. i looked at the sky, and as sure as the bats in my belfry, the sun wasn’t working anymore. i apologized to the man and continued to ride along the pier.
   present day. i held the ticket in my hand, admiring its texture. i love the way papers age and become something else long after your original interaction with them. beautiful! you get twice what you paid for. more bang in the saddlebuck. i am not a dollars man but i appreciate a bargain and i know what i want. that '37 memory was nice but it was deeply disturbing and reminded me that i did not want to remember what happened shortly therafter. i ripped up the ticket and disposed of it in my lucy van pelt trash can. i felt like crying but i decided to put a film cassette in instead.
   “angels with dirty faces.” i love those little rascals. they really yank on the strings of your heart like piggies lapping up mommy’s milk, licking the teat in a perverse but natural, loving, inoffensive way. i couldn’t get enough of those teen-aged freckled floozies. i don’t know how many times i had watched “angels with dirty faces.” more times than i told my mother i love her.
   phone rang. who is it i said. electicity men they said. you haven’t paid your bill.
   i hung up the phone immediately and went over to the trash can. i started sobbing large tears into its hole. why did i rip up the ticket? who am i?
   for the next several hours – all three hours leading to dinnertime – i attempted to reassemble the ticket. i had dug into the trash can and, to the best of my ability, removed everything that i thought was the ticket, resembled the ticket, or was related to the ticket. in a relatively small amount of time, i had pieced all of the vital pieces of the ticket together and clumsily (completely because of ineptitude, not for lack of effort or interest) taped it together with yellowed scotch tape.
   the ticket, in its entirety, read:

   FISHERMAN’S BALL
   POTLUCK & DANCING
   6:00 TUESDAY the 19TH
   PLEASE ADMIT ONE (1) INDIVIDUAL
  
   and, in small print, were the words

   LOCATION: JANET’S WAY.

   it was not out of aesthetic or literary interest that i felt compelled to reassemble the ticket. i just wanted to prove to myself that it was real, that that distant, dirt-coated moment with the sealers and the whalers and the dock workers and the harpoon campmen really happened, that it wasn’t a fictional event i planted in my mind to justify the space i take up in the town.
   i looked at the kit kat bootleg felix clock on the wall. dinnertime. i put the reassembled ticket in my desk drawer and put on my dinner tuxedo.