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Yorkville’s penniless. Now the Diggers wanted city controller Allan Lamport and Mayor William Dennison to make the village clean and safe again by designating it an automobile-free zone. While they were at it, they also wanted the powers-that-were to get rid of all the cops who’d started hanging around and to basically give Yorkville back to us, the kids, the ones who’d turned the developers and the politicians in their back pockets onto the idea of it being such a swell place to begin with. Those are the facts.
    The truth of the matter was that as much as the idea of a pack of drooling businessmen stumbling all over each other in the fight to see who would be the first to bulldoze down the village to make way for upscale shopping boutiques and exclusive dog-grooming salons bothered me just as much as it did Christine, the light of pure indignation that burned in her dark brown eyes whenever she raged on about some injustice or another was matched only by the hot flush of moral fervour that came to her cheeks, her accusing, clenched jaw and fight-ready fists illustrating wonderfully well that she damn well believed every word she said. So, okay: Christine thrilled me with the way she could hate. And sometimes I even wondered whether, if somehow I were given the choice, I wouldn’t retain just a few slimy businessmen on the side if eliminating all the evil in the world would mean never seeing her so angry and so beautiful ever again.

    â€œMaybe Bill and Thomas can lend their support to the cause in song,” Kelorn said.
    Poster plastered, Christine put the rest of the pile and her roll of tape on the counter and accepted the cup of tea Kelorn pushed her way. Kelorn’s smile catching, Christine blew on her tea and began to cool down herself. Cutting her eyes my way, “Don’t tell me Thomas has got you writing songs with him now,” she said.
    â€œOh, I’m afraid it goes beyond that, my dear,” Kelorn said. “Thomas has enlisted Bill as—get ready for it, now—his drummer.”
    I scurried up the ladder with the last of the unshelved books like a dog-treed squirrel. What the hell had I been thinking? Me, a musician. Pretentious asshole.
    But before Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki was spinewise upward in its proper place, Christine laughed warmly and predicted that I’d make a fine drummer. But of course she would. Christine despised the bad and loved the good and therefore was altogether good herself. And Christine loved me. Christine loved Bill. I jumped down from the ladder five steps from the floor.
    â€œI’m not saying I’ll be any good at it right away,” I said. “But it’s really a gas, you know? And I’m willing to work, I’m ready to put in the time. And Thomas, he’s got a kit waiting for me over at where he’s rented us a rehearsal space and he says he’s going to give me an extra key so I can go over there and practise any time I want. And maybe”—it was all coming out now, flood of relief flooding—“you could come by sometime and, you know, jam with us.” Jam. Hot damn, I really did feel like a musician now. “I mean, if you’re into it.”
    And not for Thomas’s sake but for my own, this last invitation. Because whatever feels good you want your closest ones to share. You see a sunset of particular postcard beauty and you wish she was there to see it with you, simple as that.

    Finishing her cup of tea and gathering up her posters, “Maybe,” she said. “Why don’t we check out your drums and have a look at this space tonight after we eat.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. Everything really does work out in the end if you procrastinate long enough, I thought.
    Goodbyes and see-you-tomorrows said, but before we could ding the doorbell on our way out, “Oh, I almost forgot, hold on a sec’,” Kelorn called out. She went to the