4 Unwitting Hostages is fairly obvious. In testing, many schoolchildren labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pay attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pay attention to. And yet much the same thing happens in adult life — as we age, many people notice a shift in the objects of their memories. We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself. This explains the frequent tip-of-the-tongue feeling when trying to convey what is important about some memory or occurrence. Similarly, it is often what makes it so difficult to communicate meaningfully with others in later life. Often, the most vividly felt and remembered elements will appear at best tangential to someone else — the scent of Velan’s leather shorts as he ran up the aisle, or the very precise double fold at the top of my father’s brown bag lunch, for instance, or even the peripheral tableaux of little Ruth Simmons gazing blindly upwards while a circle of peers castigates her for the Plato figurine and — contiguously in the window but elsewhere in the actual narrative — in the woods along the driveway of the estate of the wealthy manufacturer, of Mr. Simmons, her father, staggering blindly in and out of view while holding the stump of his severed hand, groaning for help as he runs in his vivid snowsuit, and all too often running blindly into the forest’s trees due to his own hurled blood and particulate matter’s having rendered him blind, and the whole highspeed tableau is grainy and imperfectly seen because of all of the trees and spiky undergrowth and the driving blizzard and huge drifts of wind driven snow, which Mr. Simmons finally bounces headfirst off of a tree and falls headlong into one of, a massive snowdrift, and disappears all the way up to his boots, one of which is moving spasmodically as he tries to struggle for stable footing, unaware in his shock, pain, loss of blood, and blindness that he is even upside down, while, meanwhile, diagonally down and across, a C.P.D. technician is kneeling on the dilapidated front seat of the Simmons family’s car, drawing a body outline around the place behind the wheel where the rescue team had found the bright blue body of Marjorie Simmons, whose frustrations and disappointments were now all over, and whose body — still holding its lipstick, which made a small, sharp looking lump in the white blanket that covered it — was being loaded in the blizzard onto a large ambulance stretcher by two orderlies in white gowns while a C.P.D. detective with snow on his hat talked to the heavily bundled housewives who had been shoveling out their driveways and were now all leaning tiredly on their snowshovels talking to the detective, who was taking notes in a small notebook with a very dull pencil, and whose own fingernails were slightly blue in the cold, and the driving snow made everyone’s eyelashes white, and the two Columbus Public Works workers in large yellow boots who had shoveled Mrs. Simmons’ car out of the igloo-sized mound stood together next to a towtruck, blowing into their cupped hands and hopping slightly up and down, the way people who are both cold and bored often do, facing away from the street and the blanket with the lump over the stretcher with just two small boots with fake fur fringe at the ankles poking out, and the house that the two bored C.P.W. workers (one of whom has a red and silver Ohio State U. ski cap on with a buckeye fluffball at the top) are facing without even really seeing it is one of the houses whose backyards (this one’s has a swingset whose swings each have a large, brick-shaped block of snow on them, that has accumulated) abut the copse of elm and fir trees at the edge of Fairhaven Knolls that separates the neighborhood homes from the R. B. Hayes school ballfield in which even now the dominant rottweiler is again trying to mount the Simmons’ lost dog, in the actual field through the classroom window, miming the position and expressions of mating, exhorting the defenseless, long suffering whelp to sit still and endure it or else something really terrible would happen.