Gone the Sun [antikvár]

Soundings A destiny, you might call it, began—according to the weather report in a yellowed newspaper clipping—on a drizzling February afternoon in 1943, when James Payton "Beau" Gunn II officially arrived on earth and was certified a human being of American citizenship. This event occurred in a small hospital in Washington, D.C., while the bitterest war in history raged on both sides of the world. The first of the two most important documents that circumscribe our lives attested that Beau was a white male weighing a respectable eight and one-half pounds and that he had a small triangular birthmark on his rosy bottom. The second document, recently signed by the county coroner, revealed, among other things, that in four intervening decades Beau had grown to a height of six feet two inches and a weight of one hundred eighty-four pounds; he had acquired an inch-long scar on his right hip just below the waist and suffered from mild liver enlargement—none of which had anything to do with the official cause of his death. Of course, there's more to it than that. Sometimes I think we should be issued another paper, a Life Certificate, if you will—which could contain some brief statement for 3