j. buck ford

I first met William Singer crossing the Ingraham Commons at Vanderbilt University in the winter of 1995. He was a striking and intimidating figure; a tall, thin rail of a man with hands the size of dinner plates, eyes the color of pitch set above cheekbones that might have been sculpted, and a mane of white hair that hung over his shoulders like an ermine epaulet. 

The following accounts are transcribed verbatim from six (6) digital thumb drives recorded between June and August, 2004. All emphasis, punctuation and parenthetical inserts are the author’s.

The stormclouds came down from the West that morning before the first light of day. Long fronts of great hulking thunderheads lumbering across the vault in the pre-dawn dim, bunching up against one another at the plateau like immense bolls of cotton packing into a baling chute.

Harry Truman was President on the day I was born. When I was three, Dwight Eisenhower took the office. Two more men would follow before I reached the age to vote.