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I can't help but marvel at the influences at work here. When I was a teenager, I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club. One of the monthly selections was Fritz Leiber's fun novel, "A Specter is Haunting Texas," a story of post-nuclear America, where weightlessness-weakened astronaut Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz returns to Earth within an exoskeleton to reclaim a family Canadian mine, only to discover Canada is now North Texas.

When Gil described his upcoming surgery, which will require the use of titanium strips within his chest, it reminded me of the novel, so I went out on Google to find this cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey for a British edi­tion of “A Spec­tre Is Haunt­ing Texas”. And Gil, with the aid of the slogan remembered by his brother for the Seventies TV show "The Six-Million-Dollar Man," now has the coolest of T-Shirts!

The best of luck, Gil! I want to be acting on stage with you soon, my brother!