As it turns out, it's never too late. I mention that only because last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the Red Planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor's appointment.
Oh, wait, maybe I'm a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn't on Mars. The strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn't in life as I'd previously known it. Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller Jr.'s sci-fi classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz," last visited in 1961 at age 17. It's about a world ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later, still barely in recovery mode.
