ONE: It is 1959 and I am newly settled into the dormitory at Columbia College in New York City.  I am sixteen and very excited.  I go downstairs, cross Broadway to the smoke shop and ask for a pack of cigarettes.  I am almost stymied when asked which brand; who thought of that?  I blurt out “Camels,” no doubt a triumph of cumulative advertising.  I go up to my desk and carefully light one.  The bits of tobacco stick on my tongue.  The paper wrapper gets wet with my saliva as I cannot keep my mouth dry.  The ash ascends to my eyes and I cannot read my assignment.  I throw out the pack of Camels and next day buy a pipe.

TWO: It is about 2000.  I am fifty-eight and very excited.  I am standing on the main street (only street) of Timbuktu watching a nomad in flowing blue gown sitting tall atop a huge yellow camel.  The combined shadow must be twenty yards long, it crosses the road and makes a right angle turn up the side of a mud building.  The wind at his back blows puffs of sand between the camel’s legs and adds to the growing mini-piles of desert clustering in the corners of the buildings, attempting to erase the street itself.  The rider looks down with what I interpret as scorn, his dark eyes glowing out between the bright blue neck scarf and the bright blue turban.  The rider kicks the camel’s flanks and the animal slowly moves past me.  There is a strong animal odor.  I do not know if it is the camel or the rider.

THREE: It is today.  I am seventy and very excited.  I see a blurb on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and turn to page A9 for an article that I hope will interest me.  The government of Mali had given the French President a camel in February as thanks for assistance in fighting the Islamist rebels.  It seems that Hollande left his camel in the care of a Timbuktu family, which promptly killed and ate it.  The replacement camel will be shipped directly to France, where I suspect traditional French cuisine will eschew its meat and allow the animal to live peacefully somewhere in Paris.  I want to go to Paris and see this camel.  I’d walk a mile for a camel….