Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.

I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.

One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.

I write about families. That is who we are.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

But that's life. That's what you learn from when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.

You decide for yourself when it will hurt.