WHEN I FIRST APPROACHED MY neighbor, Lou Guzzetta, to ask if I could sleep over, he readily agreed. He warned, however, that there might not be much to see.

“You can write about me,” he said, “but it will be boring. I have nothing going on in my life, nothing. My life is zero. I don’t do anything.”

That turned out not to be true, but I understood what he meant. In recent years, the pace of Lou’s life had slowed.