at Emory, VA

3:54 p.m.

The old man is napping in his leather chair. He is like the cats. One never knows where one will catch him napping—in that faded blue Adirondack chair in the garden? The chair in the half-circle library? The swivel chair that holds him now? His bed, perhaps? During the movie on the couch, during Maestro, but not during the thirty-minute comedic videos like Black Adder, Upstart Crow, or To the Manor Born?

Snow white hair, figure fuller of late, arthritic knees, sky-blue eyes and handsome face. He looks like Michelangelo’s David still. He gets better looking with age—far better in fact than his Everly brother’s twin when, at only twenty years, we first met in the fall of 1963—in a literature class on the Hill, surname Ward having been brought around behind Baugher when space failed in the far-right, back corner of our classroom. He was “getting” the literary allusions of T. S. Eliot, and I was clueless; and he knew who I was, likely because of the plays in which I had been cast by Dr. Marius Blesi.

Never in my wildest dreams, as a young girl who did not know she had a face, could I have imagined then that we would be the dearest of friends in our dotage!

Life is such a surprise—the gradual unfolding of it, that is. An on-going, ever-changing panoply of events seeming so out of our own control. We only think we plan! It is our folly to try and control things. Shakespeare says it best of course: “Life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” And what is that quote about “strutting and fretting our way across the stage”?

In this turn of events, my having met Glynn sixty-some years ago now, Reality has been kindness herself, the boon I expect her to be in all things. The Buddha teaches that reality is always kind—a stretch for me on the best of days. My Now is kind. That is enough, is it not?