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Show •225 but nevertheless the old red star so big it takes years for it to spin once on its own axis. I a m a hazy astronomer who can't tell Betelgeuse from Antares, but there must be some star such as that, a ponderous dancer in those cold reaches, trailing skirts of tenuous and unimaginably gorgeous flame. We slam through two or three country towns one after the other, whipping up dead leaves and old newspapers, making the shop windows tremble. By the next night, cruising through Iowa, I feel a little better, the first pitch of grief diminishing. Perhaps, I admit, Fancy was right and it wouldn't have worked out. Life with her was a roller-coaster ride through love and despair, with me hanging upside-down from my safety-belt about half the time, startled and dizzied by some new exotic plunge of the machine. Afternoon finds us rolling between fields of wheat that cover the earth as far as we can see. Graceful red machines sail up and down in the middle distance spitting out chaff and bagging the precious grain. Above it all is a clear cruel sky of simple blue; a hard flat glare falls on everything. It is an unequivocal landscape, with no room for elegant shadows or plays of light. By midafternoon we have left North Platte behind and begun our long dip toward Denver, the Rocky Mountains, and another chapter. But I remember Fancy, and I weep a little |