A Hazy Shade of October

It’s curious how one’s memory bank suddenly pings like a jolt out of the blue. One day last week I was visited here in Baltimore by a longtime friend, Granville, a jovial fellow in town for a wedding, taking a short break from months of research in Oaxaca he’s undertaken for a book he’s in the process of writing. Granville was an intern of mine in 1985, when I published Baltimore’s City Paper, and upon graduation was hired as a reporter. He was a pup, willing to comb the streets, interviewing various bad men in search of a story, and, after hours, was a lot of fun gallivanting around what passed for the bar & club scene in Baltimore. I wondered how old he was now, guessed correctly at 47, and marveled that I’d now known Granville for more than half his life, even though it seems like we’d first met maybe a decade ago. The calendar zips by, I tell my sons, which naturally falls on deaf ears, given that neither of them are yet 20.