was all that was said. Andthat, it turned out, would be our last weekend together at the cottage, or anywhere else.School intervened. Other voices, other rooms. By the next year the friendship that seemedbeyond a second thought, like the hill on which the cottage stood, had vanished in a cloudof noise, new friends, rivalries and dust. Tom fell in with some old friends from the city.Sagacious, street-wise friends. Friends who had no use for stream-fed idylls or the vileaffections that were rumored to be turning him queer. He faltered academically the nextyear. He was in and out of trouble. In high school he was suspended for smoking in theparking lot and mouthing off to the civics teacher who caught him. The cocky brilliancethat made him a leader ingrade school, was informing his delinquency now. Or so we’dheard. After his suspension, he never returned. For my part, new friends, new pursuits,closed in around his memory, until it was clammed away with my broken heart. I learnedfrom Barry, over breakfast at Denny’s years later on one of my rare visits to Michigan,that Tom had been killed in a car crash, years ago, coked to the eyebrows, on MiddlebeltRoad on Halloween. Hearing that, I stood up and bawled. While a discretely unobtrusivespeaker somewhere played Bobby McFerrin singing Don’t Worry Be Happy, I cried myheart out.

October 17, 2012

October 14, 2012

October 10, 2012

October 7, 2012

I sat down at a sidewalk table at Starbucks and this girl was reading aloud from a newspaper to her two friends, college kids I would