emily turned eight. congratulations, good job, i say. didn't you just have a birthday last time i saw you? maybe not, my chronology is like my memory. i remember pictures though. pictures connect times. i was thinking about kids' sense of time. a kid in the library asking her dad, remember when i was 16? and she was like about 7. her dad said he didn't remember that. emily said mister must be a human and we talked about reincarnation and i said i think people might evolve into dogs if they are good and sometimes dogs might come back as people, not necessarily because they were bad. i told about the movie where a man comes back as a dog. she said oh i know that movie. anything you mention she says oh i know that one, and she'll start recounting the story, and it resembles the one you remember.