But isn't it funny, this bitter memory of stereotyping at ther hands of "friends" — that she is a mediocre person, a non-thinker, a person of no great account. It haunts her, and she can't shake it.

Rachel has made herself. Her parents were relatively uninvolved with her (though they loved her). When her dad died suddenly when she was 15, she was on her own in the world. Her plan had been to be a doctor, but she became depressed in college (made for by Social Security moneys from her father's death) and was unable to do well in pre-med.

When the two of us met in November 1975, we were two mutts in the world, with neither pedigree nor portfolio, but with (at least we thought so) an interesting spark. I loved Rachel's intensity. She burned with a pure blue fire, and I could sense the broken-hearted girl just behind her striving.

When you love someone like I loved her (and her me), these little sleights from other people dwindle. But she and I never rally healed from our childhood losses. All we had was "bootstrap therapy." A resentful part of us still wonders if our better-educated friends know how hard we worked, and with what few resources.

I don't feel quite the same way as Rachel. But it is not for a lofty reason. The fact is that I am in casual despair that, after all the millions of words I have written, people peg me as a technical writer, or business reporter. Or failed poet or fired columnist.

The difference between us is, yes, I'm misunderstood. but I can do this., what I'm doing right now. Even if no one reads me, I know I set the record straight where it matters, inside the honeyed head.

A favorite coda from a favorite Bob Dylan song, which I take to be a prelude to all meaningful peace:

If you won't underestimate me,
I won't underestimate you.

I don't know why we do that to each other, that chronic habit of underestimating. I suppose it is Darwinian — if we were to get our entire minds around one another, we would explode. We need to forage for food, not feel ecstatic love for one another. Better to edit one another down to job descriptions, and leave it at that.

The truth is that we are all looking for love in all the wrong places — in the hearts of acquaintances, where our seed can find no purchase (a freely associated phrase from a favorite movie about love that never stops growing, Raising Arizona). They too are stumbling around in need, and we're no better to them than we ask them to be to us.

The only cure for this ache, for those who passed, and those in the past who could not love us as we needed to be loved, is tears, and forgiveness, and our own reconciling dust.