Considering everything you’ve said about San Francisco, it makes perfect sense that the spirit of East Sixth is alive and well on Waller Street. (It’s nice of you to invite me to your weekly potluck, by the way, but unless it decides to move east, you shouldn’t expect me anytime soon.) I’m so glad the Poetical Theater’s production of your poem cycle in the park was a success! I’m glad you miss the snow, and no, I won’t send you some. If you want a snowball, you’ll just have to come back and make one for yourself.

61. Grete and Kaja in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 1963

The day Lillian took this one, she wasn’t even being a photographer, which is to say that she had her camera, but her finger wasn’t tyrannizing the shutter release. People seem impressed that, in the age of three-martini lunches and thirty-five-cent cigarettes, my mother didn’t smoke or drink, but if you ask me, she wasn’t loftier or purer than anyone else; it was just that a cocktail or a Pall Mall would have gotten in the way. This picture happened on an afternoon when Lillian and Grete were walking Kaja and me back from Mrs. Ardolini’s. I’ve since realized that Mrs. Ardolini got paid to look after children between the end of school and when their parents got off work, but at the time I thought she was just a lady who didn’t mind having lots of kids at her place while she smoked Winstons in her green BarcaLounger. Kaja and I had convinced our moms to make a park detour so that we could practice our flying technique on the ratty playground swings. Until recently, we’d been allowed to hit the playground on our own, but that had stopped when the South Brooklyn Boys and the Untouchable Bishops started hashing out their differences with baseball bats and car antennas up and down the park.

The instant Kaja saw the tree, she ran over and started climbing. Unlike me, who had to be lifted onto any limb higher than my waistband, Kaja could climb everything. Lillian caught Kaja balancing on that branch as if confident the air will hold her up. Grete is less convinced, and voilà, Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, slightly revised: large white hand almost but not quite touches small dark ankle.