I, being born an archive, can still lay hands on my own page portrait of Alabam. It was lifted from an aged tome, called Certain Problems of the Spirit, stuffed with Medieval-looking woodcuts:

Thus said Bernard of Clairvaux, the great thirteenth-century Cistercian, on the joys of bodily resurrection-

Do not be surprised if the glorified body seems to give the spirit something. For it was a real help when man was sick and mortal. How true that text which says that all things turn to the good of those who love God. The sick, dead and resurrected body is a help to the soul who loves God …

Truly the soul does not want to be perfected without that from whose good service it feels it has benefited in every way. Listen to the bridegroom in the Canticle inviting us to this triple progress: “Eat, friends, and drink. Be inebriated, dearest ones.” He calls to those working in the body to eat; he invites those who have set aside bodies to drink; and he impels those who have resumed their bodies to inebriate themselves, calling them his dearest ones, as if they were filled with charity … It is right to call them dearest who are drunk with love.

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.