Beneath my glass I found a cocktail napkin with the following on the back. For not the first time, I was glad I do not soil my whiskey with ice. A perspiring glass would have ruined that message in its blank ink that began with:

“By the time…”

Here is what followed:

” …you read this, I shall be gone or dead or something even more permanent. In any case, my voice will no longer be for hearing, my words no longer for reading. My son, one day you will ask how the world works and I will not be there to tell you.

In a moment I tip down the barrel, tamped down like a musket ball between powder and a wadded bit of clean white cotton. I have time enough for just these words before the trigger is pulled.

The world is a furnace.

Vast, and of an iron so black that one must never look at it against the sky for worry of losing the stars, the furnace gouts a smoke that holds the fabric and quality of all things. Behind the furnace is one man, stripped to the waist and sweating rivulets through the streaks of black soot, revealing heavy muscle and lurid tattoos.

From dusk until dawn, he shovels to take over for the power of the sun as it falls steaming into the ocean. When the sky bleeds orange and red, he takes up his shovel and a deep breathe. He feeds coal to the furnace by the light of his mother the moon.

Shovel by shovel, the furnace burns because of him and the world can continue to pitch and roll against the dying of the light. In the morning, when the sun creeps stretching and yawning, dragging the dawn behind like a sleepy child, the man lays down his shovel and waves good day to the moon.

He sits by the deep blue sea and basks in the warm light of the sun. Soon he will step into the water and wash the coal dust from his skin, his clothes, his hair. But first he sits, catching his breath and coughing, exhaling soot as if his lungs shelter dragons. He’ll load his pipe and make smoke of his own, rolling it around his teeth like good cognac. Only after will take off his hat, lay his cooling pipe atop it and walk into the waves.

That, my son, is the true way of the world. All manner of men with confidence and credentials will tell you otherwise but never believe them. Not ever.

If I teach you only one thing in this short time, let it be that.

Never believe the men with confidence and credentials. They lie.

The world is magic and powered by a furnace.

Goodbye.”

I folded that napkin up and it has survived with me all these years.

Now I offer it to you. I pray you can find some use for its words. I know they have been of frequent solace to me, though I never met the man who wrote them first.