Long talk on the phone, day-before yesterday, and (at her instance) yesterday, with my oldest friend,

Margo Seideman/Egbers/Wheeler/(and finally Mrs. W'm.) Hurd, who lives way over on the East Coast in North Carolina, about Life, and about our lives starting out together, back in October of 1964 when she married her first husband Donald (then "Deacon") Egbers, and the next month, when (at his instance) I moved in with them in their upstairs apartment on East 10th in Spokane, and stayed with them through the next spring and summer of 1965,  when we all lived in a 36' sloop moored in a marina in Portage Bay at the foot of University Way in Seattle, till I left our irregular union and we went our several ways in September--me to a job in an export brokerage and documentations firm in downtown Seattle, and an apartment on Capitol Hill; they (together at last, or finally just the two of them together) went back to Spokane to a failing marriage in which Margo worked (as a social worker) and Deacon continued painting (brilliantly) and play-acting and rôle-playing (preposterously).  The high point and major event in our lives having been, in December of 1964) meeting and staying in contact (for the rest of our lives) with (His Avatarship) Bill and Sue (née Sylvia Calvin) Weaver; as eventually I, and all my friends, did do.  Margo generously allows that I was the glue that kept her and Deacon together, and herself sane, and I told her--what she might not have realized--that my getting up every morning and chopping wood was  what kept me physically fit (You don't need much at age 22, but you must have some exercise, and it must be regular) and our little household on the boat warm and fed (when there was food to cook). So I rang off recommending Babette's Feast, saying that it was Pope Francis's and my favorite movie. And last night, courting sleep, I looked it up on Hulu and watched it yet again, paying particular attention to the incidental characters--the kitchen lad, and the fashionably pious ladies at the Danish queen's court, all so perfectly rendered and characterized.