Not the Great Books

I remember walking a lot that first summer, no money but time. I remember a particular Sunday afternoon outside Greenwich Village in the wrong shoes, the wrong clothes, the wrong hair, everything wrong and telling myself I didn't belong and then stopping and stamping my foot on the sidewalk and insisting I did.

And I remember this: sitting on a curb outside a theater to see Merce Cunningham dance and holding my $7 ticket for a seat in the balcony wearing a skirt I made myself out of a yard and a half of gabardine I bought in the Garment District, and staring at a smooth-haired man with a sweater draped across his shoulders and wondering when I, too, would have a pale yellow cable-knit cashmere sweater to wear draped across my shoulders should the evening turn cool; friends to meet me; time to wash and dry my hair beforehand; the energy to stand.

But then I got a job and got going, and it was working which finally took all questions of meaning away because at last I had a task (and it is when you have a task you are alive) and so my task was not, as Cicero's was, to translate Greek philosophy into Latin; not even that noblest of tasks, philosophy itself (how is one to be happy? should one be kind?), but this: to sit, by myself, on a bus, lit from within, lurching, stop to stop, across the few miles of my universe.