A Singular Person

To the best of my knowledge (or, to use the internet term, AFAIK – as far as I know), there has been only one person named Dinah in my life. I have heard of others, of course, but I’ve only been friends with one.

She and I were going to be married, when disaster struck: My family moved away when I was seven years old and my plans (I never really checked with her) went down the drain.

You don’t say to your father, “I want to borrow the car so I can go up to Stratford and see Dinah” when you’re only eight. The only photo I have of her is from my eighth birthday party at our new house, a light-year away (4.2 miles as the car flies, much too far as the boyfriend walks). Then they moved across the river to Milford, another light-year. Fate conspired against us and who knows where we would be now had we stayed next door to each other?

I like railroads. Would I have been introduced into her father’s line of work, the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad Company? At one point, he took a stroll off the back of a train going 60mph. Nobody knows why, and them that knows ain’t talking. Maybe I’d be in my father’s career, trucking. Close friends ran a machine shop and I’m pretty good at that type of work; could be I’d be machining parts for local industry.

Maybe we’d have another Dinah; then I’d know two. Of course, as we got to be nine and ten and beyond, maybe we would fall for other people and our lives would go in different directions ... just as they have.