If You Go To Tokyo,

When We Lost Something Precious, And We'd Looked And Looked And Still Couldn't Find It, Then We Didn't Have To Be Completely Heartbroken. We Still Had That Last Bit Of Comfort, Thinking One Day, When We Grow Up, And We Were Free To Travel Around The Counry, We Would Always Go And Find It In Norfolk...and That's Why Years And Years Later, That Day Tommy And I Found Another Copy Of That Lost Tape Of Mine In A Town On The Norfolk Coast, We Didn't Just Think It Pretty Funny; We Both Felt Deep Down Some Tug, Some Old Wish To Believe Again In Something That Was Once Close To Our Hearts.

And What Made These Heart-to-hearts Possible--you Might Even Say What Made The Whole Friendship Possible During That Time--was This Understanding We Had That Anything We Told Each Other During These Moments Would Be Treated With Careful Respect: That We'd Honor Confidences, And That No Matter How Much We Rowed, We Wouldn't Use Against Each Other Anything We'd Talked About During Those Sessions.

I Felt Slightly Superior To Student Politics, For Instance. I Had No Reason To Think This, But I Thought Of Myself As Slightly More Seasoned. I Became Quite Cynical Talking To My Student Friends.

The Fantasy Never Got Beyond That—i Didn’t Let It—and Though The Tears Rolled Down My Face, I Wasn’t Sobbing Or Out Of Control. I Just Waited A Bit, Then Turned Back To The Car, To Drive Off To Wherever It Was I Was Supposed To Be.

I Don't Really Like To Work With Literary Allusions Very Much. I Never Want To Be In A Position Where I'm Saying, "you've Got To Read A Lot Of Other Stuff" Or "you've Got To Have Had A Good Education In Literature To Fully Appreciate What I'm Doing."