Me, at the time I began writing Strange Tango.

The destinies of a pantheon of gifted Cornell graduates unfold through the internet.

        After my niece had graduated from pre-kindergarten several years back, she started summer classes at vacation bible school where she saw Luke, a former classmate who had left the class to be home-schooled in anticipation of his father’s deployment to Iraq.
        “Do you remember me?” she asked him.
        “Yes,” he shyly replied. “I do.”
        The weeklong pattern of rainy and gray New England weather inspired me to remain in my cocoon and to revisit my early adulthood. Once a person has entered my orbit and been a significant part of an era in my life, a bond of shared experiences is created. There is history between us. I carefully choose the people I invite into my space, so relationships have been of long duration. I can recall only one significant disappointment.
        Prompted by a vivid dream, I sought to reconnect with someone who once mattered to me. “We don’t want any contact with you at all,” he replied. Still, I persisted. How could someone with whom you have had a symbiotic bond—a karmic connection—change, or age, so much? He had such love of beauty, how could charm and grace be replaced by fear and inflexibility?
        Or had he simply forgotten me?
        For the next nine months, I sought openings that would reveal the answer to me until, finally, I released the beautiful memory of a dear friend to the stranger he had become. My dream was indeed prophetic: his heart was dead inside.
        Other reconnections have had far happier endings. Continue reading Speak, Memory