she slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn't feelalone.

Evan no longer tells people I fight bad guys for a living. When asked, he tells his friends that his dad talks on the phone a lot and vacuums on occasion.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Nos-tal-gic,_ Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for __ostalgic._ __os-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Very important.___eally, old fellow?___mportant. Very important. Nostalgic. When we nostalgic, we remember. A world better than this world we discover when we grow. We remember and wish good world come back again. So very important. Just now, I had dream. I was boy. Mother, Father, close to me. in our house.__e fell silent and continued to gaze across the rubble.__kira,_ I said, sensing that the longer this talk went on, the greater was some danger I did not wish fully to articulate. __e should move on. We have much to do.

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.