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Sunday Morning Coming Down…

That's the title of a sad popular song by Kris Kristofferson, about a man with no wife and no children and nowhere to go and not much to look forward to on a quiet Sunday morning. On this quiet Sunday morning, I was that man. Nowhere to go and not much to look forward to.

I carried a cup of coffee into the living room of my flat in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. It was a pretty nice day out, cloudless, a little windy-no sign of the heavy fogs that usually blanket the city during the month of July. The part of the Bay I could see from my front windows was a rippled ultramarine and dotted with sailboats, like a bas-relief map with a lot of small white flags pinned to it.

I moved over to the tier of laminated wood bookshelves that filled the side wall beyond the windows, on which I kept most of my six thousand-odd detective and mystery pulp magazines by title, chronologically. I ran my fingers over some of the spines. Black Mask, Dime Detective, Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Double Detective. I had started collecting them in 1947, and that meant almost three decades of my life were on those shelves-nearly three-fifths of the time I had been on this earth. And next week, next Thursday, I would be fifty years old.

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