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about Captain Midnight all the rest of that day. And there wasn't a ten-minute stretch, all the rest of that day, that I didn't think about it.
    •
    It was inventory all that next week. I didn't see Jeffty till late Thursday. I confess I left the store in the hands of Jan and David, told them I had some errands to run, and left early. At 4:00. I got to the Kinzers' right around 4:45. Leona answered the door, looking exhausted and distant. "Is Jeffty around?" She said he was upstairs in his room …
    … listening to the radio.
    I climbed the stairs two at a time.
    All right, I had finally made that impossible, illogical leap. Had the stretch of belief involved anyone but Jeffty, adult or child, I would have reasoned out more explicable answers. But it was Jeffty, clearly another kind of vessel of life, and what he might experience should not be expected to fit into the ordered scheme.
    I admit it: I wanted to hear what I heard.
    Even with the door closed, I recognized the program:
    "There he goes, Tennessee! Get him!"
    There was the heavy report of a squirrel-rifle shot and the keening whine of the slug ricocheting, and then the same voice yelled triumphantly, "Got him! D-e-a-a-a-a-d center!"
    He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilohertz, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed , one of my most favorite programs from the forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
    I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn't a rerun of an old program; I knew every one of them by heart, had never missed an episode. Further evidence that this was a new installment: there were occasional references during the integrated commercials to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the forties: aerosol spray cans, laserasing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word "uptight."
    I couldn't ignore it: Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed .
    I ran downstairs and out the front door to my car. Leona must have been in the kitchen. I turned the key and punched on the radio and spun the dial to 790 kilohertz. The ABC station. Rock music.
    I sat there for a few moments, then ran the dial slowly from one end to the other. Music, news, talk shows. No Tennessee Jed . And it was a Blaupunkt, the best radio I could get. I wasn't missing some perimeter station. It simply was not there!
    After a few moments I turned off the radio and the ignition and went back upstairs quietly. I sat down on the top step and listened to the entire program. It was wonderful .
    Exciting, imaginative, filled with everything I remembered as being most innovative about radio drama. But it was modern. It wasn't an antique, rebroadcast to assuage the need of that dwindling listener-ship who longed for the old days. It was a new show, with all the old voices, but still young and bright. Even the commercials were for currently available products, but they weren't as loud or as insulting as the screamer ads one heard on radio these days.
    And when Tennessee Jed went off at 5:00, I heard Jeffty spin the dial on his radio till I heard the familiar voice of the announcer Glenn Riggs proclaim, "Presenting Hop Harrigan! America's ace of the airwaves!" There was the sound of an airplane in flight. It was a prop plane, not a jet! Not the sound kids today have grown up with, but the sound I grew up with, the real sound of an airplane, the growling, revving, throaty sound of the kind of airplanes G-8 and His Battle Aces flew, the kind Captain Midnight flew, the kind Hop Harrigan flew. And then I heard Hop say, "CX-4 calling control tower . CX-4 calling control tower. Standing by!" A pause, then, "Okay, this is Hop Harrigan … coming in!"
    And Jeffty, who had the same problem all of us kids had had in the forties with programming that pitted equal favorites against one another