Up, And Away

Michael Graff: He's sitting on his couch, shirtless, hunched over a hard-earned belly, breathing hard-earned air, in and out, trying to remember. His face droops, and his right side is numb.

"Aw, Christ," he says. "What the hell am I trying to say?"

We're attempting to steer around the blotches of white matter on his brain.

"You were talking about the raccoon," I remind him.

The raccoon. Yes. He remembers this. Back there, somewhere, along about 1967.

He was 23 years old, and on a fine afternoon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he was about to throw a dead raccoon from an airplane when something bad happened. The wind caught the pilot chute that was tied to the animal and sucked it into the…