Writing late, and "This long time gyal me neva see you..."

Writing, not late in life but late at night, and therefore error-prone. I just reread my last post, and apologize for the plethora of mistakes, stylistic and otherwise. I'll try not to let it happen again. Funny, the times that appear on the net as times when I post on the blog are very different from the real-time times! No matter. As someone in my just-finished novel says, "It's always six o'clock somewhere in the world." I am celebrating, hugely but very quietly, a phone call from a very good friend with whom I went to college and who vanished thereafter, lost in Africa and then Europe. I've dreamed of her, written about her, searched for her – and then suddenly, out of the blue, an e-mail, a phone call, another phone call, and there she was, talking to me from New York whither she'd come to bury her mother. Amazing! As it turns out, she's been living in Germany, and has probably been there the couple times I've visited for the Frankfurt Bookfair. She said she'd tried to find me too and had not been able to, and I said, "But I'm easy to find!" Of course, she'd not have known my married name, so I'm thinking that I may have to start going by both maiden and married names, though that's always seemed a bit pretentious to me. Better to do what many women do these days, which is to keep your 'born name'. I'm looking forward to talking to Rosario, as she was busy with bereavement business just now and we could only exchange phone numbers. It's funny. I had just about reconciled myself to dying without ever talking to her or seeing her again. She helped to keep me sane when I first came to the USA, to an almost all-white women's college, in Civil Rights time. She was a strange, remarkable little squirrel of a woman, very much her own self, and well acquainted with herself, even then. I shall be enormously happy to catch up with her.