November 4, 2013
Monday

Then [a fortune teller] told me I . . . will live to be at least sixty or seventy. . . .Someone will achieve great things because of knowing me, things that would not have been possible without my existence.
— Suzanne Rivecca, American fiction writer
from the short story “Yours Will Do Nicely,” in Death Is Not an Option

In the next few weeks, we’ll probably see a lot of “anniversary journalism,” as the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy comes around. I have a note in my planner to write to a friend whose Sweet Sixteen birthday party at a downtown hotel I’d attended the week before, and to the classmate who danced with me that night.

I have a definite penchant for the writing exercise that calls for imagining your characters “a year ago/a year from now.” I do it with myself, as if I am a character in my own story. A year ago Ron and I were struggling together with the complications from his eye surgery that disabled and distressed him. A year from now — I haven’t thought about that much yet.

Yesterday I attended a reading by alumni of Franklin and Marshall College who were published in their Alumni Arts Review. I’d been invited by my friend Mitch Sommers, who read part of a story I first saw in manuscript. And then I went over to the library to read an article in the current issue of The New York Review of Books that was written by the woman who was a leader in my Sewanee workshop last summer.

And I couldn’t help remembering that I had done nearly the same thing on nearly the same weekend seven years ago. I’d been to a presentation by someone who would become one of my closest friends, and afterward went to F&M’s library to read material by another former workshop leader. I walked in some very familiar places, brought an absent friend to mind, and not long after learned that he had died. Some of our mutual friends reported that they had, seemingly randomly, thought about him. We concluded that he came to us, to say goodbye.

That weekend changed my life, I’ve said. I would meet Mitch a few weeks later, in a writers’ group that didn’t stay together long, but that gave me my association with him, which has lasted. I started paying more attention to the impulses to reach out to old friends, to get in touch, to stay connected. I falter on that, but, in a phrase my late friend often used, I keep on keepin’ on.

I would turn sixty a few months after that weekend that I say changed my life. The fortune teller in the Rivecca story tells the 20-something character she will live to be “at least sixty or seventy,” something that is unimaginable to her. I’m right in the middle of that range now. Last month I sent a later passage from that story as a birthday greeting to the young man I met seven years ago, now no longer at the beginning of a great career, but well on his way to the next big thing:

I don’t want to know every little thing that’ll happen to me up until the day I die. . . . I think that meeting you was the first step toward a new way of being. And I am touched, and I walk into the woods knowing it.

I’ve needed renewal this fall. I’ve walked into the woods knowing it. I am still walking.