Life in the Afternoon | Esquire | FEBRUARY, 1962

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning

will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down

just the way it was. “You don’t have to

prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready

for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand

out in the sun again.

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I am living a life of which Ernest Hemingway would be proud – a montage of cold plunges in the sea, gin at noontime, hearty lunches, and languid hours lazing in the afternoon sun.

Moving fast, let alone breaking things, is the last thing on my mind.