Infinity

This would be intolerable, surely. Rock said the word, "Infinity," and it began to repeat itself again and again. It would not stop, and it was loud beyond reason. There was talk that it might echo forever and that mankind might be unable to endure such a circumstance. Rock hoped no one would know he was the man who ignited this insane oddity.

Lunch

Rock stopped by Russellville High School in Russellville, Arkansas, to have lunch with his twin first cousins, Bill and Crutch Aikman. They were joined by Keith Ledbetter, a boy their age who grew up two houses west of theirs. Rock's cousins and Keith were still in high school, whereas he was a 59-year-old sportswriter in town from Levy to watch a high school football game for the paper.
Bill, Crutch, and Rock ate the standard school-lunch fare—meat of some fried sort, green beans, and corn, but Keith had a feast in front of him. It looked like a meal from the Faded Rose, with trout almondine, featuring a whole trout,  a soaked salad, and steamed vegetables with a cheese sauce.
Rock had never seen anything like it on a school lunch table. "Keith, do you always eat a lunch like this?" he said.

Early October

Rock's professor was a cute, perhaps thirty-five-year old Asian woman. He had only seen her a once or twice, or however many times he had attended her class, which he remembered as something from the advanced biological sciences. There was one other student in the lab when Rock walked in.
He approached the professor, and it suddenly occurred to him that this wasn't the only class he had so frequently skipped. It was the first day of October and he knew he was enrolled in three or four others that he hadn't attended since the first week of the semester.
The time had come to turn things around, and Rock hoped to find a sympathetic ear in this pretty and smiling young professor.

Jen One

Jen Reynolds appeared out what seemed like nowhere to Rock. He hadn't seen her in nearly twenty years, but there she stood in the backyard of his tiny, one-room house on 35th Street. She held three kittens, one of whom would become the mother of his longtime pet cat Pam.
Rock didn't know what to say, even after Jen asked how the Green Bay Packers would play in the coming season. She looked like the twenty-four-year-old he remembered from so long ago.

It worked

It was the same scooter Rock had ridden thirty-five years earlier when he was in graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Now he was back in the same environs, inhabited by the same faces he remembered from his mid-twenties.
He found the scooter, a lime-green Honda with eight-inch tires, parked in the back of the old Razorback Pub on Dickson Street, and it started right up. As he rode it up toward and into downtown, he noticed it had become unbalanced. The hand grips were loose, and it tended to stall at low speeds, but it worked, and it was still fun to ride through the halls of the Aransas Democrat Building in Little Rock.
Rick McFarland flagged him down on the ground floor, which had the dusty, barren, and unfinished look Rock remembered from his first year or two at the paper. Several of the old men from the print shop were with him.
"Rock, we're putting together a Classix ticket," Rick said. "You want in?"
Gamblers had to pick winners of six consecutive races to cash in the Classix at Oaklawn Park. Rock always tossed in a few bucks.
"Of course," Rock said. "What do y'all need?"