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

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.

She would seize every opportunity to dive into the bathroom, in a swirl of white towels, and once in there she was as hard to dislodge as a limpet from a rock.