I was anywhere from 5 to 7, and my friend Randy and I were playing in the dirt to the left side of the driveway, towards the bottom, not far from the poppies. He was telling me about church. "Church?" I said, "You mean you believe in God?" "Yes," he said. "That's crazy," I said, "If there was a guy with a white beard living up above the clouds, the astronauts would have seen him, and they didn't." Randy neither demurred nor assented.

Years later I would learn of an amusing Russian phrase from the Soviet period: Kosmonoftu scazali shto Boga nyet! (The Cosmonauts say there is no God.)