Curious little Life it's been...though I was unconscious of much of this at the time,

Being old already, eight years ago, during Evo Morales' first run for the presidency, at a time when I was having lunch regularly in a Senior Center in a city on the Mainland, I used often to encounter 'Maria' there, an even older (say, twelve or thirteen years older), proud and native aristocratic daughter of Bolivia, whose enthusiasm for the advent of democracy and nationalism, and the end of alien, oligarchic fascism in her country was like a flame of splendor and purity which far outshone my own however generous, yet somewhat tepid, by comparison, enthusiasm.  Though twice married, and twice widowed--her last husband having been a Naval Surgeon in the entourage of the King of Sweden, and very much a woman of the world, Maria could scarcely believe that I was gay, and when she had made it perfectly clear that I had been give the opportunity to seduce her--and that, unforgivably, I hadn't--there was a hell of dust-up or brouhaha of comic opera proportions; which, in an earlier time would have ended with her stabbing me in the thigh with a dagger.  If she is not in Heaven, I wonder if Maria will have returned to Bolivia to savor the latest, most far-reaching triumph of Evo Morales--Surely it's been a long while in the history of the world since so radical a populist enjoyed the support of his country's most patriotic aristocrats.