The shifting reality of time, friendship and love is difficult for Maloney to grasp. Life keeps knocking him down, but he keeps on getting up. He believes in resurrection, in the human spirit divine. At times he talks a load of Maloney Baloney, he admits it too, but he also understands that he and Molloy "were lovers of the world, and of all who sail within it." The story opens on a bridge.

"And so," his grandfather said, continuing the story as he gently squeezed Jake's hand, "the land retains the soul of those who have died, and reaches up from the earth, planting the heart of the storyteller, and the painter, and the artist, with its truth; retains the soul of those who have died, of the soldier, and the commoner too ... And so the dead grow, though they are dead. And so the dead live, though they are no longer alive." As Danny grows to love Jack he begins to understand love, and loss. In the second story an old man visits his mother's grave. The quest to understand love and...