When Neville met Abdullah he had been a strict vegetarian for seven years and refused to eat the dinner Ab prepared; Ab ate huge quantities washed down with rye and many bottles of Porter and finished with ice cream, insisting it would poison Neville but not him. The last time Neville saw him Ab was well over a hundred, and he was told Ab went back to Ethiopia to lay down the garment he had picked up there a hundred years before.
Date (happened)
between 1929 and 1932
unresolved
before 10 May 1963
bound
Source
bound from the telling lecture nid 1780 (1963-05-10)
Reasoning
The event is told in the past tense in nid 1780, delivered 1963-05-10 (that claim's confidence: certain, preferred), so it had happened by that date. This is the same premise phase4 L6a and L4.5 rest on, stated at the precision the evidence actually supports rather than as a fabricated year. It replaces nothing: the 1900 placeholder row remains, lowered, as the record of what phase3b did. `bound` is never `preferred`, so this does not change what the event displays.
before 10 May 1963
bound · probable
Why
Supersedes the L0.5a retype-only placeholder in precision; both stand, append-only.
Reasoning
The first dinner with Abdullah is recounted as already past at the moment of telling, so it precedes the lecture's delivery date. That date is uncontroversially established (catalog and the transcript's own byline agree exactly) at 1963-05-10, replacing the earlier placeholder bound that had been built from a later, unrelated remembered moment ('last time I saw Ab') rather than from the telling lecture itself.
between 1929 and 1932
estimated · possible
Why
M7 dating pass (529; 525's readers, packet 004)
Reasoning
Catalogue dates for the meeting with Abdullah: 1929 (event 963), 1930-31 (765, 771), 1931 (962); the strict vegetarian regime began at twenty, 1925 (1746, 18772), and 'seven years' of it ends about 1932. Windows conflict, so only possible.
before 1900
bound · refuted
Why
pm-actor-525: refuted by the M7 dating pass (529; 525's readers, packet 004): Sentinel placeholder year, not a date: 'before 1900' is impossible for an event in Neville's own life (born 1905); Abdullah is met in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
Reasoning
v1.1/l0.5/retype/w1: type stated -> bound. The note 'Last time I saw Ab' bounds this first-dinner event only because it must precede that later farewell meeting; it is an inference from a different remembered moment, not a stated date for this event. || v1.1/l1.4/sentinel1900: year 1900 here is not a date. `corpus v1 / phase3b` emitted it as a placeholder for "unknown, sometime before the telling" whenever the speaker used a vague temporal phrase — this row's own source note is the phrase. The same sentinel was identified and converged on in run v1.1/l0.5/retype/w1-conv. It carried confidence `probable`, which no evidence supported. Lowered to `doubtful`; an honest `before 1963-05-10` bound is appended alongside from the telling lecture (nid 1780). Nothing deleted, no year invented.
Sources
Source
- Incubate the Dream ¶24 (And so, when I met Ab, I was a strict vegetarian and had been for seven years. When I saw the dinner he first prepared and invited me to sit with him, I wouldn’t sit. I wouldn’t touch it.)