Johnny Giraardi came into town singing

“That’s how I choose to remember it; that’s how it ought to have been. I’ve never understood how people know where and when to begin their stories, or end them –how the imagination, that untrustworthy instrument can identify and preserve, for some dubious eternity, the precise instant after which , as vulgar romancers say, nothing could be the same again.”

Ignorant Armies: prelude and theme. D.M. Fraser (Pulp Press 1990)