It was good to get up before noon, not sleep in too late, go downtown with Jenn. It was a quintessential afternoon downtown. We had coffee and ran into Zeb and Ransom. Then we went to the Deadwood and had a beer, and Jenn skipped her class. It felt good to be in the Deadwood at that hour. We felt safe.

What began as a quintessential afternoon downtown evolved into a quintessential afternoon at the Deadwood. Dave Zollo came in and sat with us for a while. He�d just done a two-week tour of Italy. The quintessence continued as Jenn skipped her second class of the day and we watched the television with no sound and more alcoholics came in to get out of the sunlight and I leafed through a wayward copy of Little Village.

Later, at work, a girl came in and asked where the restrooms were, and in the same breath asked if I was John Paul Mohan. At the same moment, I recognized her as an old acquaintance from high school. She asked how I was doing and I told her, then asked what she was up to, if she was living here, and she shook her head somewhat ruefully and then continued, telling me in a very matter-of-face tone that she�d had some �problems with mental illness� and had been staying in a �place� upstate. As she was saying this, I noticed that she looked a bit jittery, not quite comfortable in her own skin. I didn�t know how to respond to this information, but she talked over the awkward silence and we lapsed back into pleasantries. Still, it left me a little shaken.

Because every time something like that happens, I�m reminded of other reins I�ve let go of, relationships I�ve let lapse, people I've lost touch with. I think of friends from college, camp, even old jobs, ghosts that are quiet most of the time but occasionally leap out at me at odd moments, like at work or as I�m falling asleep. Such lapses are forgivable, they are a fact of life, but they are still unsettling. Every day I put off writing that letter or making that phone call brings us all one day closer to death. That might sound melodramatic, but it�s true�how many times did I just count on seeing Gwen the next time I went to Grinnell for the holidays? It�s not like I went out of my way to keep in touch with her otherwise, and it�s not like I go out of my way to keep in touch with other people who may, one day, just simply not be touchable.

As we get older, it�s easier to let years go by between phone calls and visits without noticing that passage of time. The other day my father said that time seems to move faster as we get older because each unit of time that�s elapsed�whether it�s an hour, a day, a year, whatever�constitutes a smaller fraction of our life thus far. That�s so obvious, yet it had never really occurred to me before, and now it�s got me spooked.

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