“So what is the last thing you remember seeing?” the reporter from the Alumni Magazine asked me, which does sound a bit like the initial stages of a police interrogation. The truth is that, after an accident I suffered with a kitchen knife at age five, I had totally lost my eyesight, so maybe she thought it was a fascinating question to find out exactly what visual memories a mathematics professor in his seventies, who hasn't seen anything for more than sixty-five years, still has.

Thinking back on it, the last thing I recall seeing wasn't, as an old-fashioned romantic like me might have hoped, a totally magical sunset, with bands of rose and magenta and yellow and green, silently slipping into the Gulf of Mexico at the end of a beautiful warm autumn evening (alas, why would a five-year-old boy remember that kind of lover's moment?) It wasn't a Christmas tree cheerily standing guard over an array of mysteriously wrapped packages, many (maybe most) of which had my name on a little tag attached to them with a red ribbon (a five-year-old might very likely remember that narcissistic scene). And it wasn't even the Little Boy Blue wallpaper in my childhood bedroom (who's surprised at not remembering that?)

I suspect the reporter subconsciously assumed my last memory would be something significant and poignant, something more like my mother's beautiful loving face looking down at me as she tucked me in at night after I had said my prayers.