"You're a rebel. I was too, but in a different sort of way.
You're a real risk-taker, but not for the sake of taking risks.
You do it because it's the only way you know how to be."
Peter nodded.
"You've got to understand and accept that it just takes a little healing, over time. Time. I can tell you this because I've been through it myself. I almost died once, had that heart attack I mentioned to you the other day. Got it from not letting go. Almost lost my life. But worse, after I got out of the hospital, I almost lost my wife. Ah, I don't want to get into all that. Just understand something mister, that this isn't the last time it's going to happen to you. You have to know that now, while things are germinating up here." He tapped a finger to his head. "When the next thing comes, when you start out all clumsy and getting into it all over again, even if it's way back in the back of your heart, you have to accept that someday it's going to change, end, and then you start all over again. And again and again. You keep doing it. Over and over. And it gets better and better with age. Just like they say."
Peter felt choked up listening to Byron so candidly share his experience. "But," Peter started with a little more than a quiet puff from his lips. "But it hurts."
"Of course it hurts," Byron said. "But you pick up, dust yourself off, and go at it again. Where do you think all this age-old advice comes from? It's truth, friend, that's why you're hearing it from me. Sure thing."
"I don't know. It's not all the same, you've got more that matters," Peter said, hitching his thumb absently in the direction of Byron's home.
"Hah, boy's blind, too. I see a lady in there who looks at you with real fancy in her eye. She's standing by you strong, I know it."
Byron took his pipe from his mouth and looked thoughtfully into its bowl. "I'll give you something to think about, and you let it roll around in your head a bit." He sniffed. "Thing is, is I've been bored lately. Yeah, I love it here, and our home in Connecticut, and Gracie, and we've been talking about maybe traveling again this winter," he said, waving his pipe in the general direction of everywhere in the world, "but I've been feeling sort of itchy. Like I gotta do something. You ask me, I think there was a reason for us running into each other the way we did."
"How's that?"
"I don't know why. Not yet, anyway. I suspect it has something to do with our difference in thinking. I mean that in a good way. We come from different worlds, yet we we're not such different beings. If you and I put our heads together, I bet we could really show the rest of 'em a thing or two."