On an early summer afternoon, on the campus of Indiana University, decades ago, a woman departing with her husband, for a new job in Florida, leaned out the window of an El Camino to say good bye. We'll keep in touch, we assured her. She looked pained, and cried plaintively, "I'll never see you again!"

One of the side effects of the pandemic is that I, no doubt like a number of folks, have become unaccustomed to visitors. I have a memory of my home being much neater, but I don't trust that recollection. I can attest that I used to go places and do things out in the world more often. These days I am home most of the time.

enough just before the end of the twentieth century - and I can't ask her, or my parents, now in the twenty-first. But the treasure lives on.