“we do not speak anymore, this person whose bed I slept in one night. seeing you reminds me of how childlike I felt, and I refuse to feel that frightened anymore.”
It was my freshman year of high school, and I was at my first Model UN conference, walking out of the dining room of the Hilton hotel where the conference was being held. I had just finished lunch with my friends and was heading back to my committee room, when I saw a face I hadn’t seen in several years. My best friend from grade school was getting onto the escalator in front of me. I started slapping my high school friend, Margaret, in excitement. I pointed to my old friend and whispered loudly, “I went to elementary school with that guy!”
“You didn’t talk to me today. And I suppose I didn’t say anything either. So I searched for an excuse for you to remember me, wondering what I could possibly ask.”
“I am quite overwhelmed and somewhat surprised that something that I helped get off the ground over as generation ago is still relevant and cherished over 40 years later”
It is October in Chicago and somewhere in the Susquehanna River a salmon is preparing to die. It has spent the last few years in perpetual transit, wandering the yawning expanse of the Atlantic and its arctic abyssal plains, upstream through currents and wave crests and darkness of unimaginable depth.
