Passing the time was excruciating without painting. There was the hour-long morning walk, in the late afternoon there was twenty minutes of working out with his light weights and a half hour of doing easy laps at the pool — the daily regime his cardiologist encouraged — but that was it, those were the events of his day. How much time could you spend staring out at the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason? On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime. He got out of the car on the ocean road and went up onto the boardwalk and sat on one of the benches that looked out to the beach and the sea, the stupendous sea that had been changing continuously without ever changing since he'd been a bony sea-battling boy. This was the very bench where his parents and grandparents used to sit in the evenings to catch the breeze and enjoy the boardwalk promenade of neighbors and friends, and this was the very beach where his family had picnicked and sunned themselves and where he and Howie and their pals went swimming, though it was now easily twice as wide as it had been then because of a reclamation project recently engineered by the army. Yet wide as it was, it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that — the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed li............