I am alone in New York this week and I have double vision, so when I walk down the street, I pass identical twins who often are leading identical dogs and my loneliness feels rather dramatic. Double vision cost me my driver’s license and as a pedestrian I’m moved by the world around me, by the kids playing in the park, squealing and chattering, inheriting this grim world of bad actors and rampant horror. I had a good long life and I’m not sure they’ll have the same opportunities that were showered on me. This makes me terribly sad.

I once was a hardheaded realist and now I’m a puddle of tapioca pudding. Partly this is due to being alone for a week. Every happily married man should experience loneliness on a regular basis so he can gauge his own happiness. Loneliness has advantages: you can leave your cereal bowl in the sink for days and nobody says, “Why can’t you put this into the dishwasher?”, but on the other hand, nobody comes and sits on your lap and says, “I love you. You are precious to me.” Women don’t walk up to you on the street and say that.

They used to back when I read poetry on the radio, read love poems in an intimate mellifluous voice, and sometimes a woman would hear my voice in the grocery store asking where I could find the prune juice and she’d whisper, “I loved the Cummings poem you read this morning”, so I’d say it to her, “Since feeling is first, who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you”, and even though she was a copy editor and syntax was her business, she put her hand on my shoulder and sighed, but that was when I lived in St Paul. New York women don’t do that sort of thing.