I knew Conra back when our lives were surrounded by elderly artists, creating beautiful things in high-class parts of town, in green, overgrown homes made of brick and adobe, with flower-strewn paths marked by clay statues and trees climbed so many times by small children such as ourselves that the burrs and knots in the old wood were worn almost smooth. Over twenty years later, we sat together at a small metal table on low metal chairs at a coffee shop that Conra frequented with his friends.

"What do you do, these days?" I put to him lightly.

Contra smiled at me over the top of a steaming paper mug of black coffee, backdropped by the thriving morning street in a cozy corner of San Francisco. His cream, tailored shirtsleeves and pinstripe pants spoke to a thriving executive, but his rakish, and somewhat long hairstyle and his tan, rugged features spoke more of a frequent outdoorsman playboy. He was certainly good-looking, but that wasn't exactly a profession now, was it?

I watched his coffee drain from the cup over the next half hour. He spoke of people he knew and paintings he'd bought at auctions, and listened with much attention to how my life had played out ever since my elderly parents had died: peacefully and of old age alone, some years ago, and leaving me some small amount of money to move along with before I made my own with the degree I had recently earned from the small university in Santa Higuero. I realized that I may have been talking too much. I was slowly recalled to our childhood discussions, where he would wait for someone else to talk, giving them enough yarn to knit themselves a sweater that he could wear himself. I don't know quite how to describe it properly.

It was much like finding a recent edition of a magazine you remember from childhood but haven't read since: the writers, subject matter and deep opinions changed; but somehow the core soul of the thing is the same. You never know if that feeling of marred nostalgia is due to marred nostalgia or reality. Conra was a completely different person from the small child I had grown into myself with. His clothes, foods, and scents had been completely erased. But somehow, all the same, you could feel a decided sort of underlying electric edge to him. It used to excite me. Now, meeting and being a person older than ten, I realized that I didn't recognize much of what I was seeing really at all.

"I think the best thing that's happened to me in a long time was Elegencia," he said, idly watching a cyclist pass by, overtaking the Monday morning traffic.

...