There are those who long to make friends in foreign lands — the foreigner the better — who strain to acquire languages, so they can say, and understand, such things as I am hungry, cold, tired, or Do you like opera? Sport? I know this longing. I want a turtle to love me. Not abjectly like an imprinted bird, out of some fawning reflex; I await a turtle who will sway toward me, its weight aloft, and look me in the eye; I expect the inner turtle, secret, barbarous, to seek my recognition, and to try — like a staring infant on the bus, stirred by symmetries of mouth, nose, eyes — to see right through my Darwinian disguise.