ROSE-COLORED INTERLUDE

Gaudate (Rejoice)

We wait. The seed is planted. It waits the winter and the spring rains. (James 5:8)

In the doorway of EddieDubuc’s old sandwich shop, corner of Neponset Ave and Pope’s Hill Street, shuttered and sealed up in plywood beginning early in the Sixties. (Don’t know if Eddie ran out of money, just got tired of running the place, or what. ) Waiting in the shallow shelter of Eddie’s old doorway for the MBTA bus to carry me to the rapid transit station at Field’s Corner, after which I had to disembark at either Andrew Square or Broadway and catch the City Point bus to a final bus stop — then walk a block…all due to the drab obligation of high school of which there are only scattered happy memories, just the daily filing into the grim, dark halls of the brick school, some of that time in the first two years being bullied — and, at the outset of this daily journey, coming out the front door of 210 Neponset, walking up that long neighborhood block every morning to that bus stop in front of vacant, abandoned Eddie’s lunch place. Only now remembering the one freezing winter morning cloistered in the doorway with a couple of adults, all of us jokingly bemoaning the necessity of waiting bundled up but still cold and in severe discomfort. It was about then a bus passed by, sadly not our bus, emblazoned on its side with an advertisement for travel to Florida, a long, tanned female , sun-glassed body reclined on bright sand. Laughter, one adult joking, noting the longed-for escape. (Does he live, as I do now, in Florida? Did Florida, often warm to another level of discomfort, prove to be The Second Coming of our humanity? Humbug! We still wait, for this cannot be all there is. Are those adults who shared that doorway with me still on this earth, or gone to the Judgement and, having waiting and hoped for it, gone to the sunny sands of a happly timelessness we simply cannot imagine?)

I wait now on the morning of Gaudate Sunday, being urged to be patient, wating for the seed planted in me to receive the winter and spring rains.

This James of the Bible, is said to be one of the ancient pillars of the new Church in Palestine, one of the many New Testament personages named James. (Can I call him Jim? Was there a Jim standing in that doorway with me that cold morning? Was I laughing with a prophet?) This James (Jim) was, we’re told, an administrator, not the Apostle James. Some guy who knew a lot of good stuff and, all through the ages, is telling us to WAIT. BE PATIENT, while trying to be good, faithful, worthy, all that. Easy for him to say — or have said.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

They will light a rose-colored advent candle today.

Hope. We wait….burning, like that little flame….

DECEMBER 12TH, 2025

This date is, incidentally, many things, sacred and mundane — the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Frank Sinatra’s birthday.

But it is, most especially, the birthdays of my twin brothers Ronald and Douglas. I must note that fact, for it is very much on my mind.

Ron is extremely ill and infirm with Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Winthrop, Mass, near in to Boston, the airport and all things north of the heart of the city.

Doug has lived for decades in Denver. I’m happy to say he is healthy.

Happy birthday, Twinnies. (“Twinny is what Ron’s and Doug’s boyhood playmates and companions were given to calling them from time to time. They were identical.

They are a major part of my life. I pray Ron will gain enough health and strength to be able to get home from the rehab in Woburn, Ma. and enjoy life. I pray Doug remains healthy.

WHAT NOW IN UKRAINE?

Direct from today’s New York Times, December 8, 2025

When the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that (President) Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs.

But ( a Times investigation has found) the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish.

Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going.

Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board (Energoatom is Ukraine’s utility company) for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job.

Zelensky’s role

Zelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption.

But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.)

In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Were we warned of this possibility?

Yes, mainly, in my memory, by certain American pundits and figures characterized as “right wing.”

But, left or right, it’s the only story: where there’s money – be it Ukrainian hyrvnia, Russian rubles, American dollars or, once upon a time, Roman denarius, there is greed to currupt us.

MACKERELS IN MOONLIGHT

I’ll take a rare, reluctant excursion into a topical area I most often avoid (contemporary politics), but I do so in the interest of the worthy topic of language, specifically words, their use and abuse.

I’ve read that during the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, Hollywood comic Don Penny was brought into the White House communications office to improve the president’s wooden delivery.

Now, Gerald Ford was a good man. His transitional tenure in the highest office in the land was marked, as I remember, by steady, mostly uncontroversial initiatives (if you rule out his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which even the liberals ultimately gave him an award and told him he did the right thing in declaring an end to “our long, national nightmare,” i.e., Watergate.

He said of himself, after assuming — in a most unassuming way –the Oval Office ( going from vice president to president in the wake of Nixon’s resignation) that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” He was a humble man.

But it is true — his delivery of speeches put you in mind of another word — soporific (sleep enducing).

So it has been written that, after one trying session with Ford, Don Penny said, “Mr. President, these are words. They mean something.” It was a joke, meant to cure Gerald Ford’s inarticulacy.

But yes, we must all remember — words DO mean something.

The current president is part way through a second term in his broken tenure. His inarticulacy is well-known and, one might suppose, deliberate. He comes under enough fire from the Left without me repeating one wag’s suggestion that he functions with a fourth grade vocabulary. His supporters would say he is plain-spoken. You may notice that he repeats himself often, seemingly in a failed search to find a better. clearer way to say what he’d just said. One might also theorize that this is calculated to drive him point home — twice.

Nonetheless, in Donald Trump’s and all of our mouths, words DO mean something, whether you like them or not. Among the things for which he will be remembered is extreme rhetorical recklessness. This has been noted often by friend and foe alike, and it is clear he never intends to change, short of a divine rhetorical intervention –such as God having Lincoln, Gladstone, or even just Ted Sorensen appear to him in a dream to scold him like a Christmas ghost. “Mind your words, Donald!”

His most recent venture into rhetorical recklessness was to suggest that some members of Congress should be executed for, in an undeniably blatently political gesture, creating a video in which they remind military service members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

Well, this is true, if an order can objectively be judged to be illegal. That, of course, is not at all a clear, easily recognizable matter to determine. It could be decided after the inevitable courtmartial.

The subsequent furor among Democrats and the liberal media was a predictable — and partisan – tempest in a tea pot. But even Trump’s partisans were inclined to call it –reckless. Another in the inumerable instances of rhetorical recklessness on the part of Donald Trump. It does not serve him — or the nation — well.

This sort of thing is boundless in our society now dominated by the impulsive world of social media. Trump is our first truly social media president.

There is a way to discuss all matter — to object, affirm, criticize — that is powerful, creative, respectful, useful — if the president would only pay attention to the impact and value of his own words.

To which I’ll add, in despair, ‘ain’t never gonna happen.’ Trump is Trump –rude, crude, ineducable on this score. (How did he ever pass the verbal SATs to get into Yale??) And he is reckless. One prays his recklessness is a superficial calculation to shock on the surface while, again, one prays, he is actually more deliberative in private when he makes the decisions that affect our national and international fortunes. The jury is still out on that.

TRump is given to insulting people. I dislike that very much. That’s recklessness. Perhaps he could at least learn to be creative in his insults and denigrations, like John Randolph of Roanoke who, in describing the corrupt nature of another politician’s speech, famously said, “thy words stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight.”

I guess that would be an improvement. Better still, Mr. President, how about you just stop hurling insults?) It stinketh!

IN THE WAKE OF MELISSA…

I don’t listen to a great deal of rock music since I stopped drinking thirty-eight years ago. Much of it heard with sober sensibilities, filtered through my brittle predispositon and frank prejudice seems merely visceral, hedonistic and superficial — mass enterainment at its most venal. But, that’s just me.

And here I go praising the work of a couple of late, inspired, long-haired souls who wandered about out there in the red clay and neon rain between Macon and L.A..

I refer to keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Allman who died on May 27, 2017 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He and his slide-guitarist brother Duane (dead in a motorcycle wreck on October 29, 1971 at age 24) formed the core of the Allman Brothers Band and, with their many sidemen, made a real impact on recorded popular music. Their Filmore East recording of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is supurb improvisational, live rock, artful far beyond top 40 or studio-produced album rock fare. I’m only occasionally a fan of their blues/ rock genre but have often marveled at the craft, range, energy and improvisational near genius of these Georgia boys. I speak of “energy,” but that does not properly characterize the lolling Southern, half-staff stasis that was typical of a band, like most country or blues-rock bands, that seemed just to stand in the spotlight and play — and play and play. And that was and forever will be their glory. Just singing and playing. (Duane, by the way, was born exactly a week before me, Gregg the next year. I never knew this until I started to write this of a Sunday night.)

A guy who bought used vintage guitars and called himself a guitarcheologist, once showed me a picture of the stark, unlovely, chain-link-bordered suburban Macon, Georgia intersection where Duane, traveling at a high speed, collided with a flatbed truck and began his journey to death. There was nothing distinct or special about it — just roadside America. But this Allman Brothers fan and rock guitar afficianodo felt the need to photograph it. The band’s bassist Barry Oakley died close by, also on a motorcycle, a week later, drinking heavily and grieving. The world — it seems especially the world of rock music — seems to have its share of these dark, booze and drug-induced tragedies. I recall while in the Army reading of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s substance-related deaths about a week apart.

Gregg Allman was married seven times, including to Cher ( who was also a serial spouse). It would seem then, that he had difficulty finding true and lasting love. He’s not alone, of course. But perhaps his best song was the love song “Melissa”. His brother Duane thought so. I happened to hear it recently as incidental music on a TV series in which a guy is saying goodbye to his girlfriend — who was not named Melissa. I’d heard it before, of course, but it struck me as sweetly, sadly fetching and so I made a point of calling it up on Youtube and listening to it — and to its elliptical, purposely ambiguous but evocative lyrics, which approach but are not real poetry. Just, as I say…evocative. Isn’t that what the best pop lyrics do? Evoke images and emotions? We don’t listen to most pop music for the chord structure.

And so, Gregg wrote and sang (I pluck phrases here), Crossroads, seem to come and go, yeah…There’s no blanket where he lies…In all his deepest dreams the Gypsy flies…With Sweet Melissa…”

No, not great poetry. Maybe not even a great lyric. Just evocative of some unseen, imagined and absence and longed-for “Sweet ” Melissa…

I’ve read that Gregg Allman wrote the song as early as 1967. He’d apparently tried and failed to write dozens of ballads, and “Melissa” was among the first that, by his measure, made the grade. It is written that the band was staying in a Pensacola motel and that Gregg picked up brother Duane’s guitar” which was tuned to open E and immediately felt inspired by the natural tuning.” The title’s love interest was almost called Delilah. Gregg allegedly settled on Melissa while in a grocery store late one night buying milk. That’s how he tells it in his memoir.

And that title made all the difference to a Youtube commentator writing three years ago under the handle of RoseandRichie. I don’t know if it’s Rose or Richie that says, This song is treaasured by my dad. My sister’s name was Melissa. She died at 26 Yr old. We often listen to it and cry together. Nothing unmanly about it. My dad is a war hero veteran and when he cries, we all cry.

So it is that songs touch us — evoke, remind.

For some on the long Youtube thread following the singing of the song, there are testimonials to its personal impact that seem hyperbolic, exceeding anything I personally could claim for any pop tune, such as when mariazimmerman8639 said five years ago, this song does things to me….brings me back to every wonderful thing in my life…the whole song is just mesmerizing…alweays will be.

You read that and think of Gregg Allman, himself now gone over the horizon into the unknown bourne, simply strumming in a motel room and on a late night errand to buy milk but summoning from within something that will move mariazimmerman years afterward –well, such it is that makes songs such a splendid, eternal form of human inter-communication.

hectorthewonderhalibut6331 (a person, based on his handle, with a playful streak) declares, or, you might say, prays…God I miss the times when this song first came out. Those days and those friends. Damn.

Yeah. Damn indeed. But southerngirl300 goes right over the hedges and declares, one of the greatest songs to ever be recorded in the last century.

Well, for some, probably so. Right up there with Frank Sinatra singing anything by Cole Porter. It’s all a matter of taste. Those cultural/ generational/aesthetic barriers do unavoidably divide usf

As for times when this song came out, it was the early 70s, when romantisizing nostalgia for the 60s was already kicking in. hectorthewonder is obviously a boomer. (And, by the way, the guitar work on the song sounds to me like the work of Duane Allman who would have been dead by the time the song was released, right? One account has “Melissa” being recorded in December of 71, another in February of 71. Duane’s fingers and spirit seems, to my ears, to be on the frets and strings in and between brother Gregg’s third-person choruses of lonely longing (Crossroads, will you ever let him go? No,no,no….I know that he won’t stay without Melissa.

The brothers are gone. Their band with its distinctive sound but a shadow of its former self, lingers on, still touring, even dropping into Madison Square Garden last April.

Meanwhile, maybe for all of this century, moonlighting balladeers in roadside saloons up and down America’s highways will likely be crooning about “sweet Melissa” to slow-dancing embracing couples in dimmed romantic lightiing. No doubt many babies born to Allman Brothers fans, like the lost but not forgotten sibling of Rose or Richie, might be among those shuffling about on the dance floor.

As for weddings and funerals where the bride or deceased happens to be named Melissa…those slow, sad, sweet strains will drift out over church and lawn.

Crossroads seem to come and go….with sweet Melissa.

THE LIGHT WE CANNOT DULL

“The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way,”  James Baldwin told the writer Richard Goldstein, who interviewed him for the Village Voice in 1984. “I never understood exactly what it meant by it.” Baldwin also thought that the word “homosexual” was not a noun. (By which I assume he meant it was just an adjective, modifying a noun or nouns. Now it’s a word, whether noun or adjective, that has basically been declared inoperative by “gay” advocates–for some reason.)

One of Baldwin’s first pieces, published in a journal called Zero in 1949, was an essay on homosexuality in the novel. Novelists, he argued, know that human beings are not reducible to such labels: “Once the novelist has created a human being he has shattered the label and, in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first time, to tell us something about it and to reveal how profoundly all human being interlock.” (Emphasis added.)

There are a multitudes of ways we mortals have found to be unatural and disordered in these insane times that are disordered morally and emotionally. This has been true, from the evidence, from the dawn of time.

James Baldwin was a gifted, troubled soul who, as often happens with gifted souls and gifted artists, managed to shed some light in darkness, even as he -we, us — linger in darkness and insist on dulling the light.

It’s the human way.

 

JUST SOMETHING I DID, AND REMEMBER…

It might not seem worth remembering. It was a sad time, shortly after news of Diane Harrison’s mother’s death. I remember Diane’s mother well.

Diane’s mother Claire died near the end of the last century. I believe it was April, 1999. Their relationship was loving but difficult. But they loved each other. Somehow it happened that, sometime after the word of her death came, we drove to visit Claire’s sister, Diane’s aunt Joan and her many cousins, on the Jersey Shore. There would ultimately be a memorial service for Claire at St. Agnes Church in Atlantic Highlands. But at this point in time, it was just essential to get Diane to the Philadelphia Airport for a flight to Sarasota, Florida. I do not recall at all why Philadelphia, not Newark Airport.

But I drove her, with the help of directions from one of Diane’s Philadelphia-based cousins. I recall I parked my car in the airport garage and escorted her into the terminal, said goodbye — all these goodbye’s in life, temporary or permanent. I probably wasn’t making the trip to Sarasota because I was working back in Boston.

But this is what I’m recalling about that occassion — strange, I suppose. I recall, on my way back to the airport garage, deliberately finding one of those ground-level, glassed-in areas at the base of a stairwell. It had plastic seats mounted on a steel rod, rare as it might seem for anyone to find it necessary to pause there.

I did.

I purposely sat down in that secluded, little traveled place to try to ponder, to really dwell on that moment, far from the central bustle of the airport, sitting in a place where perhaps no one had paused to sit before, or maybe since. It was odd, as I say, to have seats there — this seldom traveled little nook in the airport, and I’m not sure how I happened to come upon it, doubted if anyone had found the need to sit there ever before or ever again — if that stairwll still exists, airports being places where buildings come and go. Airports are transitory places, unlike old brick train stations where the rails never move.

I thought of Diane alone on her way to see her aging father’s side. She hates to travel alone. I thought of her sorrow, how she must have been thinking about her times with her mother., now ended forever. Airports are full of people traveling to see loved ones in the wake of a death, or a birth.

I might have though about my few other times passing through that airport — one of them among other G.I.s being shipped to Georgia for further training.

I knew that afternoon, that I had a drive of some 700 miles ahead of me, probably into darkness — probably on the Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, then the Mass Pike. Back to the cozy little house on Acton Street in Carlisle, Mass — that, though old and dear and the antithesis of tranistory — has since been demolished and turned into a weedy, bare rise leading up to a big new house. I would be alone in that house with our little dog.

I was going to welcome some solitude. But then and now, with many changes, anxieties and obligations and difficulties and life passages ahead of me, pressing down on me, as it was that afternoon for millions. Some others at the Philadelphia Airport that day were probably on a mission of sorrow to some place in the country.

…I knew this wasn’t exactly Frost’s idyllic Winter Soltice pause by woods on a snowy evening. But I did have promises to keep, and miles to go before I could sleep.

I just wanted to sit for a moment in that obscure little corner without a soul around — just a minute, actually probably not more than sixty seconds, if that – and think about what was going on.

No one ever came along. I got up, got to my car, left for my journey. Perhaps I felt fooslish.

My heart gets heavy just thinking about it. But I’m grateful for that pause. Life would go on. Busy life.

Rest in peace, Claire. I probably, above all, entertained that thought — and thought of Claire’s and my relationship. She could be wise and funny, irascible, difficult. She was bright, smoked, drank, was never in perfect health in her later years.

I’d never intended to have these relationships. But did, and go on with relationships with the living and the dead.

Claire, in that moment in that stairwell, I probably loved you, prayed for you –and your daughter, in however a broken way.

Then it was time to get up from that seat, and go on.

We all go on.

EMPTY

It is September 27, 2025, a Saturday. I read yesterday a prayerbook marginal notation from 2009. The theme of the reading was, “The Time and the Moment,” which reads toward the end, “It is the present moment which can be offered to the Lord, none other.”

Having first read that chapter in 2009 for the 25th Weeek in Ordinary Time, I read it again in 2018 and 2023, skipping the years in between, including last year.

I struggle often to remain focused on faith, and, obviously, on the moment. The years turn to moments, and rush by.

In exactly two months, I will be 79 –on Thanksgiving Day. I must be grateful.

I rose at 5 a.m., unable to sleep further. I got up and tried to do some writing. At roughly 6:30 a.m., feeling suddenly sleepy, I decided I needed to go back to bed, but I found my little dog up and staring at me in the darkness of the living room, as if desiring to go out. I let her out to forage in the backyard’s darkness illuminated only by the green, motion-activated search light, all very dim, the air soggy. Suddenly there was a flash that, to my eyes, seemed confined to the space between mine and my neighbor’s house, very strange. But the flash had come from the sky, and thunder rolled slowly over the neighborhood. My dog , though her hearing is going, sensed the thunder and came running in distress toward the shed door to be let inside the shed and then into the kitchen. All she had been doing is licking grass. It is one of those days, still to this hour, when she is not eating.

I let her out again in daylight. She went licking grass again and did not even notice that it had begun to rain. Finally she came in.

Then ,after briefly trying to resume sleep, hoping for a nice dream but usually unable to recall dreams in much detail anymore and deciding daylight and life was calling, I got up — on a cloudy, intermittently rainy Saturday in which I have a charitable chore ahead. Long story, that.

It is 9:11. I am anxious. I must travel soon — this coming week. Airports, rental cars, highways, obligations my partner has that will make her happy, and so I must be happy to make her happy.

The bed, the dreams, they all beckon us away from life, don’t they? So does the laptop, so do words, but they have worth in life — for whatever they are worth for whoever will see them. Life beckons. The present moment.

As I dressed for the day, I saw a blue jay fly into the plastic feeder on the bedroom window– and immediately fly off.

I’m out of seed. The feeder is empty.

A SINGULAR SOUL IN SEPTEMBER

I saw someone today that I decided will be famous in some circles someday, small circles, unless she wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I say this, without a bit of sarcasm. We must all be aware that the voices of our national life that will turn up in small magazines, in poems, in novels of the future will be the product of the several generations of parents that were my contemporaries (though they are grandparents now) and by Generation X and the Millenials. Their experiences of life were different to some degree from us Boomers, but, of course, in many respects just the same. They have populated the planet with adolescents and teenagers who, in mind, soul, dress and demeanor, resemble this young woman. So I surmise — and imagine.

She is an individualists — though many young individualists seem to blend into a herd of expressive uniformity.

The young woman in question might be in high school — or she might have been in her late twenties. She had that universal ageless look about her. But — she had quite a look about her. Again –a solitary individual broken away from an army of individuals, and wearing the “uniform.”

She was checking the Large, Florida library screens seemingly in search of a book. Then I saw her wandering among the stacks in the second level — near the poetry and plays, but she might have been checking out the non-fiction areas, too. Or the theater.

She had clipped, short, blondish — blondish, almost boyish, seemingly natural — hair. She stood about five feet. She wore a gray top under a light gray hooded sweater — even on this Florida September day of typical humidity and heat. But — those who spend a great deal of time in library air conditioning might find their temperature dropping.

She was a study in blacks and grays.

She wore black high-top sneakers — and, in keeping with the expressive individually of our time that turns our bodies into tableaus, she had on one leg (and I did not notice this until my second glance) a thicket of black interlocking tattoos all the way up to the high-level top of her short. On the other leg, an equal tangle of vine-like tattoos only went up half way on her pale skin. Perhaps that leg is a work in progress.

She wore round glasses with clear rims. She had a bright orange sack slung over her shoulder. Her only dash of color.

She was, yes, a human study, and, I expect, rather studious in her own right.

She would soon blend back into the world external to the library, and not necessarily be easy to spot or single out for these enumerated physical attributes, for thought she caught my eye, she looks –as I’ve already said –like a major percentage of her generation looks these days — having made a conscious choice to express herself satorially and physically as an individual in that army of individuals.

Expressive Individualism! (Was it Robert Bellah who came up with that phrase?) Nothing all that unusual about trying to be unusual these days.

I will be left forever guessing –even should I chance to see her again and unless I make so bold as to approach and interview her, just what she thinks about life. I’d like to find out if such knowledge be obtained without offending her or rightly arrousing her suspicions or hostilities. (“Hi, I just think you’re interesting-looking and could I ask a few questions about, ah, your choice of dress or what’s on your mind….”)

Yeah, right. Someone call the cops.

But this future prospective Nobel Laureat or Poet Laureat or singer of ballads in New York or Amsterdam cafes– once she leaves home and becomes an ex-pat — this highly decorated, expressively individualistic soul nonethless is ( and do I repeat myself? Yes!) entirely typical of so many other late members of Generation Y, OR the ubiquitous members of Generaton Z. She just, as I’m saying here, caught my eye — and her understated, black and gray earth tones contrasted happily, to my eyes, with the splashy rainbow-colored conscientously eccentric types of her generation -like the “goth”s who must so deliberately put on a mask of primeval ugliness.Black on black.

And she seemed studious (as I said) and serene (perhaps I didn’t say that). I wonder what she keeps in that orange sack?

Let me say a very peternal thing: God go with her — to New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm — or just home to mom and dad and dinner tonight. And to her similarly decked-out bedroom. And to sleep.

May she find what has eluded so many who wished to make more than a ripple on life’s surface — including me.

Or, isn’t it far more likely she just wants to be alone? For, that was the other things about her — her solitude.

She is Young Miss Solitude. I like that, too. No jabbering of gossip, no noisy friends gathered around a table, challenging the library’s silence.

She was alone. A singular soul. On a September afternoon.