Dearly Disenchanted:

I had just emerged from a liquor store in Jenkintown, PA, where I had purchased a Christmas gift for my 83-year-old landlady, Mrs. Alcorn, who had a deep affection for Bailey’s Irish Cream, a beverage she would sip during our weekly gin rummy games which lasted until she would refer to me as Cy, her long departed husband; at that point I would excuse myself and return to the small apartment I rented above her garage. Stepping from the shop onto the slushy sidewalk, I was headed to my car when I was accosted by a political pamphleteer