4 — Friday, Decernber 27, 1991 — North Shore News The death and life of another year *S*HERE, OLD man,” I said, ‘‘let me take your scythe. And this, um, hour- glass, isn’t it? Please sit down.” “*Ah, thank ye, it’s good to take the weight of f my feet,” sighed my visitor in a high, crack- ed voice, decanting himself with a soft plop into my chair. I'd taken pity on him when I'd seen him wandering feebly in the streets, looking deathly ill. But only now, in the pale yellow light of my study, as readers can well imagine, stuffed with heavy Victorian furniture, antimacassars, porcelain chamber pots, pictures by Holman Hunt, and dusty leather-bound tomes bearing titles like Years of Growth, Years of Sunlight: The Collected Early Columns of Robert Hunter, and A Brief His- tory of the Third-Worid Peoples, by Doug Collins — only now did i see the faded banner across his withered chest. “Why, you're 1991!" I cried. I seldom cry, but this occasion seemed auspicious enough to war- rant it. He looked at me with some- thing of the gratitude of an old movie star who is recognized at a Palm Springs supermarket. “*The same,"’ he allowed. He began to cough, first with the tiny off-handed just-clear- ing-your-throat kind of cough, then the turning-up-the-volume variety, and finally the full- throated spewing-blood sort that empties the lungs of all air and trails off into scarcely modified death rattle. **Here, can I get you some tea?’’ I said, seizing the huge crockery pot sitting by the predic- tably roaring Victorian fire in the enormous grate. He, finishing off the cough and teturning it to its modest throat- clearing beginnings, waved off the offer, although } observed that his eye lingered a moment over the sherry on the elaborately carved are Trevor Lautens GARDEN OF BIASES sideboard. “*A glass of amontillado, then?"’ { suggested, lifting the decanter so that, held between him and the fire, he could note the clarity and fineness of its amber contents. He looked grateful again, but shook his head. “Sorry,’” 1991 said, with a small, ironic smile, ‘‘but I’m too young to drink. And you'd be ar- rested for supplying liquor to a minor.”” An understanding of his words swam only slowly through my thick skull. “Why, of course,’’ I said. “you're less than one year old.”’ I stared at this wrinkled ancient with what must have seemed like rudeness. He had indeed not pass- ed his first birthday, yet he was hideously old, an exile from Shangri-la not of geography but of time. It suddenly occurred to me that — I was afforded an unparalleled opportunity to plumb the wisdom of Time itself. Or at teast of its present incumbent on Earth, a sort of acting district supervisor, “Sir,’? said | — caught between addressing him as the venerable person of his appearance and the reality that in actual age he was <7) Y SAAN Bon mn aren) inte Src ming Y (UA MA Ae WZ Z. an infant more accurately ad- dressed as ‘‘sweetheart,’’ so that, changing my mind in the middle of the word, it almost came out as “