I ran from Large Print as quietly as I could. Thankfully, a line at Circulation started buzzing as I got to Reference. Surreptitiously extracting my mobile, I pushed the answer button as I strolled with imaginary purpose to non-fiction.

Peter Ross Perkins and I met in 1953 in New York to serve aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, the eighth ship to bear that name. She’d been launched 10 months after the seventh Hornet was sunk in World War II, but she, too, had seen much action in the war. Now, recalled from retirement, she was ready to serve during and after the Korean War. She was to be launched in all her renewed glory from Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

Jimmy, an old friend of her husband’s, showed up with a goat in the back of his truck and his arms crossed under his ridiculous mustache. The goat, he explained, had shown up at his job site near Robinhood Cove.

Through a wall of window hazed by breath and sweat, I watch floodlights on the ski lift towers convert falling snowflakes into orange embers. The trails are ribbed like children’s corduroy and the green shadows of the woods fan out before the roving headlights of the groomers. It is a scene designed to incite desire. And like all calls to physical passion recklessly luxurious.