Last month, trying to organize my jammed attic here (ninety boxes from this period, marked “Early Drafts”), I chanced upon Angie’s curious continuing portrait of me. It’d yellowed.

As usual, she scared me with how much I admired her. The passage came from a blue book I’d also seen in my mother’s daily reference library. It was always parked beside her Joy of Cooking

Emily Post’s Etiquette:

THE LETTER OF CONDOLENCE

Intimate letters of condolence are like love letters, in that they are too sacred to follow a set form. One rule, and one only, should guide you in writing such letters. Say what you truly feel. Say that and nothing else. Sit down at your desk, let your thoughts dwell on the person you are writing to.

Don’t dwell on the details of illness or the manner of death; don’t quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart cannot follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater comfort it brings.

Write as simply as possible and let your heart speak as truly but as briefly as you can. Forget, if you can, that you are using written words, think merely how you feel—then put your feelings on paper—that is all.

My erotic adventures still gathered, overlapped, truncated to shorthand, and meaning to keep themselves separate—soon knew: every raindrop, falling, intends, on impact, to remain standoffish from all those other ordinary droplets. Fat chance. Lakes are made of them. Oceans.

The time a New York cab driver, one cute, toothy twenty-eight-year-old with theatrical hopes but absolutely no experience onstage, told me he liked my looks enough so he’d actually “eat” the fare if I would spend the break time he usually wasted on a piss-and-a-burger overlooking the moonlit Hudson with him making out in the backseat, since the meter otherwise kept getting in our way. The time I met a high school boy in Times Square on a class trip and he peeled off the end of a long line and took me back to his little Edison Hotel room while his class did their walking tour of Chinatown; and the pathetic gym bags of his four roommates, white socks and jockey shorts with camp nametags stitched in back by moms, exuded the smell of adolescence at simmer, not unlike piping hot school-lunch Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. The time I wound up with a deaf and dumb house painter who wrote me notes on matchbooks and in his palm and who simply pointed at whatever he wanted and who led me home to his rented room over a Chelsea day-care center where the silence was erotic to the point of a narcotic and the only sound he made was, on coming, a drowned scream like some strangled rabbit’s last. The time I answered a personal ad and the person who opened the condo door was the married president of the college where I taught and we both laughed as I did a mock-military about-face and, wordless, returned to the elevator; and ever after he acted so kind to me, praising my sense of intellectual chance-taking and my enthusiasm that recalled to him himself when young. The time, the time that, the time I found time to, found time … all that matters in the end are the memories of the unstandoffish merging flood, of droplets, ours, the times …