THE END OF MANY MORE ERAS

Mankind’s first wife showed me to her husband’s collection cave on one end of the split-level

home, past the water heater, a hulking, many-armed oil furnace, washer and dryer, shelves of paint cans with dabs of colors on the lids to tell the painter the color within, and a dozen frames in plastic bags leaning against a post that held up the home’s entire existence.

Two fluorescent light fixtures popped and buzzed to life and neatly organized shelves with dozens of neatly labeled cardboard boxes, six fly rods biding their time on nails in the wall, and a workbench with neat piles of fly boxes and fly wallets and a fly tying vise, with a tiny Griffiths Gnat still clenched in its jaws, presented themselves in situ like viscera in an appendectomy or coworkers waiting for the door to open at a surprise retirement party.

“I know the General’s wife said he had fishing gear, but there’s a lot more,” she said. “It's a shame this stuff just sits here. One man’s treasure…” She left a slinky trail of Virginia Slim smoke as she retreated upstairs.

I found a pencil and notebook on the workbench with the indentations of old words pressed into the first page. Former first pages and the words they held (I could only imagine what sort of notes a Lieutenant General might write. Possibly rules of engagement and offensive maneuvers for his favorite trout stream. Perhaps poetry about the saving grace of mankind’s first wife and her floral floor-length nightgown.) had been torn from the spiral, never to be found.

I titled the first page:

An inventory of the Lieutenant General’s fishing gear and other collections