Simon was delighted to be fifty-three, lean and aggressive except for his belly which was not lean and aggressive. He was youhan I. M. Pei, youhan Dizzy Gillespie, youhan the Pope. He had more wisdom packed in his little fihan was to be found iire Sweets catalog, with its pages of allurial moldings and fire-rated expansion joints. He had kept asbestos and asbestos-taining products out of every job he had ever worked on, sometimes at siderable cost. He had a daughter who would e into the kit at breakfast and say, "Whos got the goddamn New York Times?" Sarah did not wake well. He could spell 49,999 words correctly and make a pretty good stab at many of the rest. He had a Broar, courtesy of a clerk-typist in his unit whose gift for writing citations for routinely rotating personnel had been envied even at Corps level. The IRS regarded him as a cash cow, on a small scale, and regularly sent him loving salutations, including, one year, a box of Godiva chocolates. He could speak persuasively iings, maintaining a grave and thoughtful tenand letting all the dumb guys speak first. He had about twice the élan of youth, normal élan plus extra élan derived from raw need and grain spirits. Several of the male members of his family had lived to be fifty-nine or sixty. "Grow or die" was the maxim that most accorded with his experiend when he did not think of himself as a giraffe he thought of himself as a tree, a palm, schematically a skinny curviical with a lot of furor at the top. With colored felt pens and a pad of trag paper he could produce impressive sketches iy minutes, which he then had to recile with reality and sweat over for forty days, cursing himself for his facility. "What about the stalk?" A design prof had told the students that there were nht angles in nature, and Simon had raised the ques?tion of the stalk. Had he to do it again, thirty years later, he would have raised the question of the tele?phone pole, a deterioration of sensibility, perhaps. He rushed toward things, normally, his present quietude a parenthesis in a life not unmarked by strife and tes?tation. Pipe bombs did not bother him so long as they did not blow his face off. The assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, oher hand, scarred his brain. He had met Palme o a feren the work of the Greek planner stantin Doxiodes in Sto in 1972, at which Doxiodes had declared himself a criminal because he had put human beings into high-rise buildings. Palme had been a benefit presence, a short man who wanted everything to go well, wahe world to succeed in good socialist fash?ion, gay and optimistic. "The deed of a lunatic," the Swedish police said, Simon feeling despair for human?kind. A friend, a Polish architect who had been at Penn with him, visited him in Philadelphia in 1984 on a grant from the Ford Foundation. Carol had made osso bud they had talked for hours. "Socialism, finally, doesnt work," Ryszard had said. "You get, you know, too many bad guys at the top." Ryszards father had been a deputy in the Polish parliament, a unist who sat for some years and had then been jailed follow?ing a ge in the leadership. It was the first time that anyone had said to Simon, with the authority of three decades of involvement, that socialism didnt work. "You get, at the summit, not the worst but the -worst." Simon took Ryszard to the airpave him as a going-aresent a Tizio lamp, regretted that he saw him so seldom, wished that he lived door, on Pireet. Carol, when they were twenty-f