Elvis and Anne

I went out to buy food because I have to eat to keep alive, and since you have to keep your eyes at least partly open as you walk around in the supermarket I saw that Elvis would have been 75 this year if he'd been sensible enough to stay alive, which he wasn't. I won't be shedding tears for Elvis, I'm afraid. He might well have actually seen 75 if he could have figured out a reason to keep alive. I think if you want to take a moment to feel sorry for a premature death, you might pause and consider Anne Frank, who was 15 when she died of typhus in a concentration camp. Billions of people have died like her through the millennia, people who might have contributed to our common good, people who didn't deserve to suffer, people who just wanted to live and be happy. We don't know about most of the billions, but we can look inside Anne's mind because she kept a diary. She was a precocious young woman, sensitive and thoughtful, and the Nazis murdered her. I saw Elvis at the supermarket tonight. I didn't see Anne. But I thought about her. Doesn't seem right, somehow.