A friend, a colleague, who was deeply in love, called me late one night and in a trembling voice begged me to meet him for a drink. He told me that he knew the woman he loved was, at that moment, in bed with another man. “I know, goddamn it, I know,” he cried. Later, he told me that he had been right; she had confessed it. I asked how he could be so certain. “I could feel it,” he answered. “I was at home, watching television, and it hit me, and I knew what was happening. It was like being there and watching. I could feel it. I knew. I simply knew.”

With me, Sol Walkman’s telephone call about Walt Whitman’s poem was not a mystic experience, not like Carolyn with Rachel or my student’s mother or my friend’s lover. It was merely a chill sweeping through me, a freezing and choking chill.

How could the book be there? I wondered. The poem of Whitman’s Child was an old sharing between Avrum and me. No one else knew about that sharing.

One afternoon, as I was leaving The Cave for work, I saw Avrum beckoning to me from his bench. I crossed the street to him.

He was holding a book that he turned for me to see. It was an anthology of poems.

“I have found who you are,” he said enthusiastically.

“You have?” I asked.

“Ja, ja, sit.” He patted his hand on the bench beside him. “I must read this to you.”

I looked toward the Inn. I could see Carter going up the steps of the platform-porch leading to the kitchen. “I’ve only got a minute,” I told Avrum.

“Good, good. Only a minute,” he said.

I sat beside him. He opened the book and began to read slowly:

“There was a child went forth every day

And the first object he look’d upon, that object

he became,

And that object became part of him for a day or

a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years …”

The poem was Walt Whitman’s “There Was a Child Went Forth.” As I listened, it immediately became my favorite of all poems. Its message was simple: there is a child in everyone and that child goes forth every day and becomes part of everything he sees or hears or experiences, and everything he sees or hears or experiences becomes part of him. Taking and leaving, leaving and taking, as Avrum explained it. It was what I had always instinctively believed, but did not know I believed until I listened to Avrum’s reading.

When he finished, Avrum closed the book and smiled peacefully.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Good, good. We will talk about it another time. Now, work. Go, go.”