– To pick up on the theme of an earlier posting, my newest friend is in the same key as I am–or, to use a metaphor drawn from a different realm, we’re on the same page, and we realized it almost as soon as we met. A person who knows us both well told me that she thought we were “long-lost siblings, separated at birth and finally together again.” Such intense and immediate rapport is a gift akin to grace, and thus never to be taken lightly, not least because it is so rare.
Only yesterday, she ended an e-mail to me with the following sentence: “Hoping your dreams entertain–let me know if any good ones grant you the luck of remembering.” As I read it, I asked myself, What part of my destiny is to be made manifest by my having found a friend capable of saying such a thing to me within days of our first meeting?
– Being a writer is a strange business: you have an experience, and right in the middle of it words start taking shape in your head. The trick, I suppose, is not to let the words get between you and the experience. I’m usually pretty good about that, but I can recall more than one occasion in my life when I found myself thinking coolly detached thoughts in the least likely and least appropriate of circumstances, from intimate moments to deathbed scenes. I can’t think of many traits that are less attractive, since the point of life is to live it while it’s happening, but the writer in me is always on duty, and though he frequently nods off at his post, it doesn’t take much to wake him up.
– I don’t often surprise Our Girl in Chicago, but I brought the trick off the other day when I mentioned in passing that I’d never in my life asked a woman out simply because I thought she was cute. Our Girl was astonished to hear this, and told me so.