Why did crumbling cities with cracked buildings and broken, beaten hearts always choose me to tell their immortal stories of hope and helplessness?

To say I was a reluctant passenger in this story is true; truer still is the fact that I was an active participant and, without me, none of it would have siphoned itself into something worth sharing. So it is my duty to share it, as much as it is my pleasure. This whole mess of tangled friendships, boundless ambition and cautious love is one we all attempt to unknot over the course of our lives and perhaps that is what we are put on this puny planet to do...

We’d have to repack the truck when it wouldn’t all fit in and I’d get furious with Plummy because he was the guy who found the gear and I was the guy that found space in the van for it all.

I was a master packer; it was my way of restoring power to the relationship. Plummy was a master talker; he had his own way of speaking and his own way of doing business. It was well understood that Plummy had lived before, hundreds of times before. Over the years, over the centuries, he’d been a thousand different people: a Roman Warrior, a Whirling Dervish, a Samurai, a Dutch Farmer, a Court Jester, a Tortured Prisoner, a Romantic Poet...but he always returned to the world to pick up precisely where he left off. Well of course, he had no memory of this, but to me – to everybody else – it was painfully obvious.

Plummy wasn’t God-fearing so much as God-dealing: he made bargains with existence because he was so unashamedly persistent, so relentlessly engaging. If he could sell me a yellow Formica table missing all its legs, he could sell his Creator on the idea of giving him another crack at reality - again and again and again.

There were probably wiser people in the world. There were probably people with more humility. There were certainly people who drank less than he did. There were prettier, happier, more-at-peace people. There were people who wanted him stoned for abandoning them… but there was no one more steadfast; no one who could step up to the plate like Plummy; no one, I knew, who had a soul’s scratch on his personality.

Me? Well, I’m Frank in all this. Hello.