As If Through a Kaleidoscope

It is said that in a near-death experience or NDE, one reviews every moment of one's life.  The same is assumed to be true of the actual death experience.  This is impossible, of course, if the time constraints of ordinary life are not suspended.  It is also true that one's "life" for this purpose must end before the NDE, or else we would get an infinite regress; we would spend eternity reviewing our reviews.  (Only Gloria Swanson can do that.)

If true, my own life review will include a very hot night in 1962.  I sat in the back seat of the family Buick with my three siblings.  The windows were open.  We were all six of us very tired, having come from my cousins' house where we kids played all day and our parents raised teasing and alcohol-infused banter from folding aluminum chairs.

My dad was negotiating the often-chaotic rotary known as Wellington Circle.  For a few brief moments this spot afforded me a glimpse, from perhaps a half-mile away, of the twin screens of the Wellington Drive-In, the size of postage stamps and bathed in technicolor.  Always I tried to spy them in hopes of seeing a half-naked Sophia Loren doing the hoochi coochi before King Herod in some half-baked biblical epic.  (The hormones were even then kicking in.)  But all I saw on this particular evening was a single screen -- Lee Marvin grinning a greasy and sinister grin beneath a giant yellow sombrero, the only Mexican no doubt for miles around.  I sank back into my seat, and the car was silent of conversation until we reached home.