In this deftly turned story, author Frances Khirallah Noble presents a story that is at once sublimely comic yet surprisingly erudite in the subjects it tackles. Its hero, Kahlil Gibran Hourani, is an ordinary, in fact rather bumbling, middle-aged Syrian American optician. On the eve of his fifty-third birthday Kali finds himself confronting seminal questions. "I face the last third of my life, he reflects, "and I don't know what to do with myself...