He came around the corner at 5:31 on foot. Work boots, a canvas jacket, a plastic bag of groceries. He is fifty-three now. He has lost the weight men like him carry in the shoulders and gained the other kind, and his hair has gone and he did not look up once in the entire two hundred yards.

He stopped at the door beside the hardware store and put the bag down to get his keys, and I watched a man who once owned a house with a wine cellar under it stand in the cold on a public pavement and pat four pockets in sequence to find a key.

He found it. He picked up the bag. He went in.

Forty seconds. That was the whole of it.

I sat in that car for another twenty minutes and I want to write down what I actually felt, because it was not what I drove four hours to feel.

It was not triumph. I had been braced for triumph and had prepared a small private ceremony for it.