Someone organized a sort of festschrift for an old colleague…

Someone organized a sort of festschrift for an old colleague of mine who is turning eighty, someone whom I quarreled with and was often irritated by. In Alex’s memory, I decided to tune instead into a time when she’d been extremely kind to me, a sort of Mother Mary when I needed one, and wrote about that instead. I could feel our friendship returning as I did, and now it’s centered again in the heart rather than in the list of slights and shortcomings I had assembled.