Jack Scanlon, at the threshold of his sixtieth year, finds himself in an uncomfortable recliner in the corridor of Day Surgery at a local hospital, hooked up to an IV tube. He is receiving three units of blood, a process that will take the better part of eight hours. He has all but convinced himself that he is a terminal case, a victim of colon cancer. If a drowning man is capable of witnessing the sum of his entire life before his eyes at the instant before he goes under for the last time, Jack Scanlon has the luxury of witnessing his at his leisure, and in chronological order. His meditations focus largely on his early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, which covers roughly the years 1944 through 1961, with a few brief detours into more recent history, a history that involves the deaths of his younger half-brother Keith, and his mother, as well as a short description of his own recent medical struggles.