“Very bad,” I replied.
“Perfect. Me too.
“In a river.” That’s how it all began.
A new project among sixty-four-year-old friends. Through Mircea, I met three other people. We started meeting on Wednesdays to play chess and on Fridays at a small soup kitchen downtown. When they discovered he had a guitar at home, they insisted he take it away. It had been almost thirty years since he’d last played in public.
The first night I played for them, my fingers were shaking. But something happened I hadn’t felt in a long time: no one looked at their phone, no one looked at their watch; everyone was listening. To others, this might seem like an insignificant detail. To me, it was everything.
The Missed Call
One Sunday the phone rang. It was my daughter.
“Dad, where are you?” he asked, with a surprise I couldn’t ignore.
“On the mountain,” I replied.
“In the mountains?”
“Yes, I came to spend the weekend with some friends.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then:
“I didn’t know you had friends to travel with.
I smiled before answering.
“You never asked.
I didn’t say it with malice or to hurt him. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much.
A different birthday. Some
