Fred sits alone at his desk in the dark

There's an awkward, young shadow that waits in the hall

He has cleared all his things and he's put them in boxes

Things that remind him that life has been good

25 years he's worked at the paper

A man's here to take him downstairs

And I'm sorry, Mr. Jones, it's time

Those are the opening lines to Ben Folds’s song, Fred Jones (Part 2), about a man forced to retire from his newspaper job after working there for twenty-five years. The song is a meditation on isolation and the impact we have on other people’s lives.

The song continues:

There was no party, there were no songs

'Cause today's just a day like the day that he started

No one is left here that knows his first name

Yeah, and life barrels on like a runaway train

Where the passengers change, they don't change anything

You get off, someone else can get on

The song closes with Fred in his basement, copying an image projected onto a plain white canvass. Fred then makes a chilling observation, a deep fear many of us carry with us throughout our lives about whether our lives have made any difference in the world:

He’s forgotten and not yet gone.

As a child, I often traveled with either my grandpa or grandma down to Mexico. I say “traveled,” but what I mean to say is, “I rode thousands of miles in a car with.”

Driving with my grandfather from Michigan to Mexico was often a real adventure. I’ve told you how he cooked hot dogs on the engine block and made us drink the distilled water that dripped out of the air conditioner into the bed of a Tonka truck when there was no other water around.

When he drove us in the Peugeot, Grandpa welded a fuel tank to a small trailer, so he could buy diesel where it was cheapest and make the whole trip by siphoning fuel out of a rolling diesel tank.