I have just finished reading the latest book by a man with gray hair, almost snow white, perhaps snow with slightly dirty car wheel tracks, with a prominent nose of undoubtedly Italian origin like his ancestry. He wears an impeccable charcoal gray suit cut to measure by the same man for decades, with a white shirt and a classic movie collar, and a yellow tie of the finest knit, which falls with the naturalness of an anchovy fillet on his chest, between the lapels of his jacket.

The man stands 5 feet 10 inches, 5 feet 11.6 inches when dressed in his impeccably hung dove grey Borsalino hat, the elegant gentleman weighs 161 pounds, 158 pounds fasting, and was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, 93 years and twelve days and six hours and forty-five seconds ago.
On one sunny blue-sky morning with two or three lone clouds to the northwest of the city, he was born to his mother Catherine, who was married to Joseph, a tailor who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s from Maida, a village inhabited throughout history by Greeks, Romans, Lombards, Byzantines, Suevi, and Albanians, in the province of Catanzaro, located at the tip of the boot that forms the shape of the map of Italy.
The man gets up every morning at 8:01 a.m. in his third-floor apartment in the four-story brownstone building on 109 East 61st Street, New York City, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A building he bought outright in 1973 for $175,000, $50,000 of which went to repairs.
He walks slowly to the bathroom with first his right foot and then his left (he has two feet) at an average speed of 2.2 feet per second, which becomes 2.9 feet per second if he is really peeing himself, and slowly washes his hands and face looking much younger in the mirror than he did yesterday, when curiously he was younger, a few feet from where a few minutes later he will sit at his desk with a huge tray of succulent muffins and a thermos full of hot coffee to write fascinating stories that will keep you glued to the paper for ho...