Do Not not Cross Tracks

Last night I sat at dinner with a gorgeous 15-year-old girl who told me just part of her story. The tumor that first appeared when she was 13. The tumor that returned. Her last eight months lived inside the walls of a hospital, and, at night, within the gracious, truly good rooms of a Ronald McDonald house.

She didn't, she said, remember the color of her own hair.

She hasn't gone home, not one day, in the past eight months.

Her wig was black.

Her skin was porcelain.

She will be, she said, smiling, then taking true pleasure from the thought, Snow White for Halloween.

We fashion heroines for our novels, we tread up and down the street of our own worries, and out in the world all around us are people like this young woman who are living lives we can't imagine, living those lives gracefully.

I got on a train. I took a ride. I crossed the tracks, beyond myself.