L.

Here's my friend L. and me. I guess we're 19 here. I just now heard that she passed away this morning. She was a finalist in a national beauty contest and as a dubious prize got a scholarship to a college in Mobile, Alabama, where I met her in music theory class. We were music majors at first. She immediately shaved her long beauty pageant hair into a crew cut (it has grown way out here) and put a pink streak in it and became the first punk in Mobile, I think, though punk was just about over then in the rest of the country. A few years later when she was going back north we cried and recited John Donne at each other, we were optimists and little idealists, we said, "Our two soules therefore, which are one,/ Though I must goe, endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to ayery thinnesse beate."