One of my favorite Vonnegut quotes is from Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

I’d add that when we go looking for the past, we find it, so we must be careful about how we look.

I was going through my boxed-up comic collection, which my brother had been storing for me, and I came upon an Avengers issue I recalled reading when I bought it, in 1976, sitting at our dining-room table. I have no idea why I remember that, but it occurred to me that way back then, I couldn’t have known I’d revisit it in 2022 in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, just shy of three decades passed since I was last in that house, and my dad gone nearly six years.

I uncrumpled some of the newspaper I balled up when packing this stuff almost 30 years ago, after my parents sold the place. There were pages from three papers in there, and this one is from the January 25, 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer.

My dad did all the puzzles in ink. This is his careful, precise engineer’s block printing. I print in all caps, too—I got that from him, I guess—but not as neatly as he did. The cryptogram answer is a George Santayana quote that I feel like he left for me to find: “Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”

I suppose so. It’s the beginning of something, anyway.

But it brings to mind another favorite quote, this one from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

No—it isn’t, is it?

Hi, Dad.

Got your message.

After 31 years of teaching middle-school science, Commons fan Linda Artruc is doing retirement right.

Colleagues take stealth photos of me when I’m not looking and then IM them to me. It’s kind of unsettling.

They caught me daydreaming when I was supposed to be thinking outside the box. I told them I was thinking outside the room.

“Question: Help! Many years ago there was a TV program called Maverick, which was about two brothers, Bret and Bart. One was played by James Garner and the other by…? It’s driving us nuts. Please try to help. I can see his face, but not his name. Thanks.”

One of my old Televisionary columns. The question was made up to give me an excuse to write about whatever show I wanted to focus on. (I nearly always did that with the first question.) It was about Maverick co-star Jack Kelly, but James Garner’s charm claimed at least half the answer.

Adios, Jim Rockford. No one ever pulled a Firebird J-turn or handed a security guard a stack of phone books, only to then punch the hapless guy in the jaw, like you.