The morning is clear, and as I pack up to leave, the sun shining through the Best Western window catches an accidental prism somewhere that refracts the light into its constituent wavelengths, filling my open suitcase with Roy G. Biv’s rainbow—the mnemonic I learned from David:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  I think of the 1960 Disney film Polyanna, with Hayley Mills in the eponymous title role, getting the acidic recluse Mr. Pendergast (or is it the hypochondriac Mrs. Snow?) to string the decorative crystal drops on a lamp across a window to fill his room with rainbows.  Hayley Mills and that film made a big impression on me:  in the fourth grade, I got a haircut identical to Hayley Mills’s in The Parent Trap, and had a locket like the one she wore as Polyanna, when she converts the pessimism of the town’s fire-and-brimstone Rev. Ford (played by Karl Malden) by showing him her locket’s inscription:  “If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.  A. Lincoln.”  Mr. Lincoln was my father George’s hero, and that quotation stuck with me.  Now, this morning, my dad, Abraham Lincoln, Hayley Mills, and my sweet David all seem to suggest it will be a fine day.  Signs and wonders.

The drive through the mountains to the Piedmont is lovely, and I stop for breakfast at a McDonald’s, the “big breakfast” of scrambled eggs, sausage patty, potato cake, and biscuit:  way too many calories, but delicious, a treat I used to award myself on the occasional Sunday in graduate school days.  I don’t think I’ve had it since, but it tastes VERY good.  And a fellow customer, a man, holds the door open for me in a most courtly manner when I leave.  Another southernism?

As I approach Greensboro—it is so much bigger than I recalled from an earlier visit, population over 300,000, with multiple highways to match—news breaks of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas:  19 children and 2 teachers dead.  This is the second mass shooting since I left home on the 13^th:  the supermarket shooting in Buffalo happened on 14 May.  I’ve not heard much news since I’ve been on the road, but this penetrates.  What is WRONG with us?

When I pull into my friend Cameron’s development, she comes out to greet me as I pull into the parking spot that her directions have made crystal clear is for me.  She’s using her Rollator walker, but that doesn’t impede her warm welcome—characteristic of this dear friend.  Cameron and I are both widows, once married to good friends, my David and her Russell, who met when they were both studying music at the University of Michigan.  David’s path branched toward art history, but Russell’s continued on to a successful career as a composer, whose works were frequently programed by the summer New Hampshire Music Festival conducted by Paul Polivnick, a great admirer of Russell’s music.  Cameron and I hit it off from the moment David introduced us, and we four spent several jolly summer weekends together in New Hampshire’s lake district, close to one of the several satellite UNH campuses hosting the Festival.  We’d spend hours floating in the lake chatting, then dress for dinner and the concert, after which David and I would spend the night as guests in one of the lakeside cabins Russell and Cameron rented—including one terrifying night when a ferocious lightning and thunder storm rolled through, convincing us all that if a bolt hit one of the adjacent towering firs, we’d all be goners. We survived.

Cameron is the kindest, most level-headed, and bravest person I know.  Losing Russell was a cruel blow, but neither her first nor the last.  A professional French horn player, she had to give that up when she lost her embouchure, and throughout her life has been afflicted by a multitude of impairments, illnesses, and chronic pain.  Yet she perseveres, calmly, uncomplainingly, logically pursuing solutions to whatever problems arise, and now continues her life in music by learning to play the violin.  In October 2019 she flew from Greensboro to help me manage David’s memorial event in our Madbury home, and we have a standing weekly phone call that has been a source of comfort and joy ever since.

I am so glad to see her in her comfortable, beautifully situated condo.

I take a little walk around the place to stretch my legs, we have a fine dinner from Reto’s Kitchen, a catering service she patronizes, and together watch the finale of a network tv show I do not know, This Is Us.  I like it—but am surprised by the number of commercials, having now gotten used to the streaming services I’ve discovered ever since COVID shut us all down in 2020.  Cameron’s taken great care outfitting her guest room with bedding for every guest’s comfort, layers of lovely sheets and blankets of variable thickness that can be heaped or discarded to accommodate the sleeper’s preferred temperature, and her guest bathroom is stocked with every conceivable toiletry a guest might have left behind.  I feel very much at home.