A Nice Enough Funeral
February, 1971
It was a bright spring morning, the flowers of the Garden District were lush and open, and Baskin, unhappy with life among his numbers and equations, got out of bed slowly, dressed and walked toward his laboratory at the university. Small premonitions rode around inside him, he felt fatigued and his memory—that cavernous storehouse by which he lived—was spinning out of control. As he walked, he peered up into the leaves arching overhead, into a deep foliage that was unmistakably New Orleans, yet...
