They say that eyes are the windows of the soul.

Does that mean eyelids are curtains or Venetian blinds?

Now that I think about it, maybe I’ve got the quote wrong.

Maybe eyes are the windows to the soul.

Who the hell cares, anyhow?

It’s two in the morning and Alexa is dutifully playing the Hall and Oates Silver Album so I can pretend to concentrate on this writing assignment.

So let’s get back to it.

I have an episode from Mark Twain’s Autobiography bubbling up from the prompt.

Unaware that a newly deceased visitor to the town had been put into his house, Twain snuck in after curfew, feeling his way along in the dark, in the nearly inhabited room.

His hand touched the corpse and as his unawareness abated, Twain left that room by the fastest route available, the window.

And he took the window sash with him.

The first time I read that line I pictured him fleeing down the road in a 1940’s bathing beauty outfit with a broad ribbon of cloth across his chest and ‘Miss Coney Island’ shining brightly whenever he passed under a street lamp.

Coney Island. The name begets memories of Nathan’s hot dogs bought and eaten on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach during Spring Break 1978. Seth, the Venture Capitalist’s son from Manhasset Hills, explaining the secret to Nathan’s French fries was the oil that was changed only once each year.

There is a good chance that Seth lied.

If not about French fry oil, then perhaps about his father’s ties to Meyer Lansky and the reason he (Seth, not Meyer) was spending a weekend at a beachfront hotel was to check out the hotel for a possible site just in case Florida voters approved casino gambling.

The blonde female who answered the door of his hotel room was explained away as Just the General Manager Who Was Making Sure He Found Everything Satisfactory.

I suspected He Found Everything Satisfactory. He usually did. Several times a night.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed his company.

The other was because it was a great time to be in college dating a rich New Yorker who looked enough like John Travolta to get us locked into a Burger King in Sarasota until he promised to sign autographs for everyone.

But like all grand passions, it lasted less than six months. I discovered the great grandson of John Ringling (yes, THOSE Ringlings) and Seth discovered drugs and the daughter of an expensive ophthalmologist.

And we’ve just taken the long way around to where we started.

Eyes and windows.

As good a place as any to shut down for the night.