What is the difference between a hero and a nut? I'm thinking of Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man: he's brilliant and stupid at the same time, and knows it, and everyone else in the movie is sensible enough to leave him alone and just let him be that. But what is the line between not a nut and a nut? It might be the same as the line between the person who rushes into the road to save the cat and the person who holds back.

I watched a cat get run over from my kitchen window; by the time I got out there, it was twitching, blood doing bloody things, life ebbing out. All on a lovely autumn afternoon. And noone around her has claimed the cat as their own, perhaps because you don't own a dead cat; noone owns a dead cat, and yet here we all are, owning our dead mothers, our fathers, in the sense that we remain connected, attached, for all it's worth; we pin their memory onto our lapels; we wear their hats in the parade.