from Nothing Got Broke

​The Man in the Moon on the Man

August 1985

     Here’s what I can tell you about Rossiter at that time: He could report and write, seemingly with little effort, and always by deadline, just about any assignment at the paper—from a teenager’s slaughter of his aged foster parents, to the rescue of a kitten stranded in a tree.

     But when it came to a domestic activity, he had a perverse compulsion to contort it…as one might twist apart and reshape a perfectly functional wire hanger into a makeshift snare, with the aim of retrieving some fumbled-away object behind the sofa or under the stove. The end result being something pretty much unrecognizable, as well as useless. 

     For example, there was this one lovely August day— which for a normal person might have been near-perfect—that preceded a sequence of events ending with him tangled in brush at the bottom of a ravine, hopelessly engrossed in the moon....