The doc finally let me go back to work. The guys at the shop don’t know whether to slap me on the back or steer clear. Like I might be cursed. I’m just glad to get some grease under my fingernails again.

My sleep got more thrown off in the hospital. Now I nap after dinner and stay up till all hours in front of the TV. Lately, instead of randomly flipping around with the remote, I punch in Channel 999 and work my way backwards until I find something that holds my attention. I can never get past a Jason Bourne movie, but there’s no telling what might be of interest—drone racing, a wildlife documentary, sometimes those stupid reality survival shows where the contestants have to eat insects to stay in the game.

The other night I came across a British interview show where the guest was a famous poet I had never heard of. He was an old guy, kind of hunched over, but he had this deep, commanding voice you would not have expected from a body like that.

The host was asking him about one of his famous poems, part of which was about to be inscribed on a new monument in Washington, and about how he had created it. Like most of his poems, the famous poet said, he had no idea what he was going to write when he started. Sometimes a thought or even a single word would come to him and he would set that to paper. And if it felt right, he would think more about it, add to it, change it around, and so on, until he felt it was done. Can you imagine that approach to any other kind of work?

He went on to say that his method, what he called his inner dialogue, allowed him to discover and contemplate his deepest feelings, although he pointed out that such a process could often be as distressing as it was revealing.

“In other words, one must plumb one’s depths,” the host said, to which the poet nodded, replying in his big, deep voice, “That’s where the poems are.”

They call the kind of heart attack I had the widow maker, which is funny because my wife was already long gone. She always complained that I was too distant. I thought she was too needy.

I was ok being single. In a way I’m suited to it. I like my work, and there was always happy hour at the Cantina. I ate dinner there at the bar several nights a week, went home and watched TV before bed. I had no issues.

But the doc says I need to cut back on the alcohol and improve my diet. He said I was given a second chance but it was up to me. I couldn’t argue with anything he said. So mostly I come home after work, and I’m laying off the burritos. And to be honest, as careful a driver as I am, it’s nice not getting behind the wheel after a bunch of beers. The last thing I need is another DUI.

I have three older sisters I don’t much keep in touch with now that my parents have passed. Two are college professors and one is a mechanical engineer like my dad. I was a surprise baby, nine years younger than the twins and seven years younger than Patty. Nobody held it against me as far as I could tell. We were a good family, but somehow, maybe it was the age difference or because I was the only boy, I always felt like an outsider, like a sports mascot who goes everywhere the team goes, wears the jersey and is a member of the team, but not really.

I remember summers when I was little I would climb the oak tree in the back yard and watch all of them. I would wave to the twins in their bedroom. They were in high school then, dancing to records or trying out some new hairstyle with curlers the size of exhaust pipes. My other sister always had her head in a book. My dad puttering around in his workshop in the garage, mom on the back porch with her geraniums and her potting soil.

By the time I got to high school the girls had been out of the house for years. I liked working on engines with my dad, and by 11^th grade I had my own car and was taking the same calculus and biology classes my sisters had. And I had the part-time job at the Rexall, stocking shelves and making deliveries for the Colonel, who was the pharmacist and our next-door neighbor.

He wasn’t really a colonel, but he had fought in the war and everybody called him that. I was always fascinated with how he compounded the prescriptions, blending the different ingredients in the most precise way to create a pill or an ointment that would take away somebody’s pain. I was 17 years old.

The evening my heart gave up I had spent most of that day replacing a timing chain on an older BMW 320i series. There’s a lot to it, but I have always been thorough and everything went well. At happy hour, with a plate of nachos in front of me, I was about to sip the foam off my third beer when the elephant sat on my chest. It was a different kind of sensation than I had ever experienced, sudden and overwhelming, and more than anything, confusing. I must have made a weird face, because Anthony looked at me sideways and said, “quit fucking around. The nachos aren’t that bad.”

I woke up in the hospital with three stents and people I didn’t know saying how lucky I was to be alive.

When I was a kid, I had only ever seen violence on TV shows, and you knew it wasn’t real, and the good guys always won in the end. Our small town was close to the Beltway but just as close to the country, which I guess described a lot of towns 40 years ago. Our community was the kind of place where not much happened and people liked to say they rolled up the sidewalks after dark. It was near closing time at the pharmacy. I was waiting behind the counter for the Colonel to finish making one of the deliveries, Mrs. Whitmore’s gout pills, when I turned to see two men in ski masks rushing in my direction. They had guns.

The sight of them coming at me so fast froze me, like those dreams where you’re in trouble but you can’t move or cry out for help. One of the robbers pointed his gun inches from my face while the other one pushed the Colonel up against the wall and started yelling about money and drugs.

Like I said, the Colonel had fought in the war, and although he was older he turned out to have more grit than the robbers had bargained for. He started wrestling with the yelling robber, trying to get his gun. That went on for a few seconds, and then the shot, and the Colonel was sprawled on the white linoleum floor, which was always so clean, and blood was pouring out of his gut. The robber holding the gun on me was now the one doing the yelling. “Jesus Christ!” he screamed as he backpedaled toward the door. “We gotta split.”

By the time the robber who had shot the Colonel rolled off the floor and stood up, his partner was out the door. But the shooter didn’t seem to be in a rush. He opened the cash register and pulled out the bills, which turned out to be 49 dollars. And then, without saying a word, he put the gun barrel to my temple. I could feel the coldness of the steel. And he pulled the trigger.

I don’t remember thinking anything or even being scared. I was still frozen, unable to process, only to observe as if from another dimension.

The gun jammed. The gun jammed, and that seemed to frighten the robber more than what he had done to the Colonel because he didn’t try to shoot me again. Instead, he turned and walked out the door, leaving me where I stood, petrified, until I heard the Colonel gasp and yell for me to call the police.

They caught the robbers over by the airport. The Colonel died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Everybody said how I survived was a miracle.

My dad died a few years after my mom. At his funeral, the twins took me aside and said they were worried about me now that pop was gone. Everyone gets stuck, one of them said, but a person didn’t have to be stuck forever. Maybe they thought this was something my dad would have wanted them to say, or it was their job now to take over for my parents. I’m sure they were doing what they thought was best.

The thing I like about working on cars is that anything can be fixed. And if it’s not worth fixing you can replace it. Put enough time and money into it and you could keep a vehicle running forever. I always get a good feeling when I make somebody’s car work again.

The other night I woke up on the couch and it was after midnight. I turned on the TV and started channeling my way down. Before long I landed on a rerun of the famous poet with the amazing voice. I was absently listening to the interview I had already heard when a thought came into my head. I grabbed a piece of unopened mail from the kitchen counter and wrote on the back of the envelope: Some things can’t be helped.

No sooner had I placed a period at the end of the sentence than I heard my inner voice reply: You think writing it down will change anything?

I stood there, perfectly still, listening for what the famous man would say any moment now about where the poems are. And then I walked away, leaving my words by themselves, as if to punish them.