This, a collection of short stories, explores the experience of love, lost love, remembrance, defiance, fear, regret, hurt, anger, death, hope, rage, observation, guilt, blame, the main character has from an early teenage life and on.
There he is reading at late forty, in "SWAK", love letters he has kept since fifteen, and realizes again why he is still single. When he reads the names of some Junior High school classmates on the new war memorial in his New England boyhood town in "Stone Names," after being re-visited by some personal experiences from his youth, he is struck by how a name, cut in stone, can have such an affect on him when he reads who is on the Vietnam column. In, "Among the Old," he has gotten lost with his girlfriend and has taken refuge in a resort for elderly people. But it is his preoccupation with the past that threatens his relationship with her when he wakes up early in the morning and imagines the elderly people lining up for an early morning exercise are inmates in a Nazi concentration camp, and the muscular looking man who has given them the room a camp commandant.
