ABSTRACT
This was my introduction to poignancy. When my children were small, sometimes we would play the game
of blowing out the red to make it change to green. Of course, the glass of the car's window-screen was in the way, but this was magic. It always worked. Quite soon the red would give way to green - and we were off. By this magic the children experienced with the traffic lights the kind of power to make things start or stop that the policeman had lost with the coming of the lights. Looking back on his life on the crossing, the new lights told him he had been an automaton all those years, for now a rotating switch in a box had replaced his brain. Thirty years later the children experienced the power the policeman had lost, as the automatic traffic lights seemed to respond to their will. Perhaps both were illusions.
