On a good day of exploration for this blog, I rediscover places I’ve been before. It feels like pieces of a puzzle falling into place.

Like the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which I first saw last spring on a tour of the Alamo Placito neighborhood with Phil Goodstein (whose tours I recommend). We were there on Sunday, and all these black women were coming out of church in blindingly white dresses. It was stunning.

(I tried to peek into the church today, but all three doors were locked. The mailman caught me coming out the gate but said nothing about it.)

I met up with myself in memory than once today. At Pablo’s on 6th, I ran into Steve Katz, one of my teachers from graduate school at CU, and he graciously sat down and talked to me. He told me that he had almost left Denver when he retired from the University of Colorado, but he decided to stay because it’s a culturally vital city. He thinks most areas of New York City, where he grew up, are declining more than they are revitalizing, but Denver is on its way up. There is a lot to do here, and you don’t have to plan months and months ahead to get tickets to the ballet or plays.

The trouble with meeting your grad school teachers is that they inevitably ask, “Are you still writing?” And I honestly answered “Yes,” telling him about the novel I began last year and then laid aside and then took up again when I got the oh-so-original idea of doing the synopsis before writing it (which is a first for me). But the truth is, I had a long period after the turn of the millennium when I wanted to stop. Or maybe I just wanted to rest and spend my time catching up on reading. I think now I should have done just that, instead of rewriting and submitting my collection of stories until I got burned out in 2005.

I told him I was tired of copyediting, and he said it must be tedious. It wasn’t when I started, of course, just as he liked teaching when he started in the 1960s.

But he said he’d never gotten tired of writing. That was good to hear.