The end

My life doesn't have that many dramatic endings.  I remember twenty years ago when we sold our old house in Sackville, N.B.  By that time we were already living in Toronto, but when my parents returned to close the deal, I went along too.  The place was pretty empty, but I did go there one last time.

Some movies have great endings.  There's The Searchers, where John Wayne is outside, seen from the inside through a doorway, and the door closes on him.  And there's Goodfellas, where ex-gangster Ray Liotta picks up his morning newspaper and remembers Joe Pesci shooting people. (The background music is the Sid Vicious version of "My Way"!) Also, there's City Lights, where the formerly blind flower girl realizes that destitute tramp Charlie Chaplin was her benfactor.  Or Citizen Kane, where the sled gets incinerated without the reporters learning it's the key to their mystery.

And there are some good book endings, like when Huckleberry Finn mentions that Aunt Sally wants to adopt and civilize him as the Widow Douglas was trying to do at the start of the book, and says, "I can't stand it.  I been there before." (Someone said that a comedy story is about going from A to B back to A.)