EXCERPT FROM “SHE TOOK MY ARM AS IF SHE LOVED ME”

The days when I was the youngest person in the room were already gone and I pretended not to miss them. I was settling into bachelor middle age, except that I called it early middle age, hoping for a merry twinkle in my wise old eyes. And just about the time I began to get used to what is unavoidable, letting the sweet seasons of San Francisco wash over me, the world changed--and not only drugs, rock and roll, the Vietnam War, and Bob Dylan songs full of nasal lists and ambiguous inventories, those external delights that entertained the late sixties in the hundred-year-long operetta of San Francisco. Something abruptly disappeared--my comfortable loneliness, dailiness, beer drinking, grass smoking, hanging out with Alfonso. The years were silting up and then suddenly they were flooded away.

Comfort was taken from my grasp. I consented. It was a case of complete surrender. Alfonso looked at me and said: “The full catastrophe, you’re gone now.”

Just, please God, don’t let me lose the memory of good luck. We saved water together. She put on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” to dance to. She didn’t mean dance. Whoever would think of dancing to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”? Well, folks can, lovers can, moving with that lazy beat under the nasal thrumming of a voice that seemed to drift over the walls of the madhouse of the sixties. But she didn’t really mean dance. Dance was only in the heart and soul. She meant climb into each other, sing into each other, keep humming and keep it on forever.

It’s a well-known fact that aging persons, even persons with a pronounced tendency to grow older, are sometimes allowed to fall in love. God winked.