Jon looked out his window to the open field behind The Lodge, remembering the boy and his dog and their game with the flying disk. He was glad that he could still remember all those things in his life, even things from his own distant childhood. He was glad that he didn’t suffer from the dementia or Alzheimer’s, like some of his neighbors and especially like those so far gone they had to live on the second floor.
He had only one child, his son Magnus. Gone now, before him. Even though he had lived full, Magnus was only seventy-five and his body and mind were still in good shape. How unfair to be taken when there was still so much good life left. Magnus too made only one child, Walden. A tenuous legacy for his genes and the genes of those that came before him, like Snorri.
As he watched the cotton clouds, white and grey, make their way across the sky above the field, the grass long enough to wave like a green ocean, it came to him, like a vision from the future, that it would not be long now until science made the medicine that would prevent the deterioration of the brain, prevent plaque from tangling and clogging his dendrites and synapses, that sometime in the future, not so far away, science and medicine would extend human life well beyond a hundred years, enabling people to keep sharp minds and spry bodies. But Jon would not be alive then, he would already be gone and the best he could hope for was the Singularity.
Would it be just Snorri? Would there be a line of gone souls, all those that linked his genes with Snorri’s, a line extending eight hundred years and beyond? His father, his grandfather, great grandfather, and his female side as well. So many people had come together over so many generations to make him. So many good people; many despicable characters as well. Like his dear Snorri. And what about all those who came before Snorri to make him, how far back did it all go?
“I am Snorri,” Jon said to nobody. “I will be Snorri again. I could still be a King too.”
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Wade Harold Johnson - Canadian Novelist/Poet 