BRIGHT LIGHTS, SMALL CITY: The local constabulary found a dead opossum in the middle of Main Street this morning, an unusual event given that opossums (is opossa the plural of opossum, I wonder) generally avoid well-lit thoroughfares, preferring to live out their lives in the more rural areas around our happy little burg. Like the leopard in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro, no one can say how this particular marsupial came to die where it did. It was a fairly young opossum, or so I have been told by those who can tell the difference between one opossum and another, and I think that maybe what we saw this morning was just another casualty of this generation’s constant need for stimulation, for excitement, of moving on swiftly from this moment’s pleasure to the next, the hatred of boredom that seems to be the hallmark of the young these days. Perhaps it was the need for the bright lights that drove this young opossum into life, and inevitably, death, in the fast lane. There is a lesson here, I think, for all of us.