Today I enjoy a sense -- one might even say a devilish sense -- of satisfaction that was missing from my own work, now buried deep beneath the children's play-park underway outside my window.

The play-park itself was recently declared an ongoing project unto perpetuity. One which will always be changing, always being shaped and re-shaped by each succeeding generation to suit its own individual taste. Thus, as Isaiah said, "a little child shall lead them."

The graveyard, where Reverend Bail used to rant and rave when I was a kid, is still there. But the cold steel chains that stretched woefully from stone to stone, describing the arena, as well as the limits of his evangelical outreach -- which groaned and screeched through the nightmares of my childhood like the spirits of the damned -- have all been cut up with torches to make the swings.

You still hear them groaning and screeching on a stormy night, of course. But now they make you dream of happy children, playing in a place you helped lay the groundwork for, rather than death and dying in a place over which you have no control, and in which you have no real stake.

As for Reverend Bail, well. Nobody seems to know where he is, what he is doing; or even if he's still alive....