We went to Maine

This was dinner one night on Mohegan. Details to come.

The People's Princess; Tempus Fugit

It's been unavoidable in the past week or so to glance at a television or a newspaper without seeing an image of Princess Diana, who died 10 years ago this weekend in a car crash in Paris. I don't really think much about Princess Diana, and never did -- not that I dislike her, she simply never interested me one way or the other -- yet it is hard to see her face again, plastered all over, and not feel moved, nor to think about the 10 years gone since then.

Perhaps this is the simplest and yet most profound: When she died, she was older than me, and always had been. Now, she is younger than me. She will always be younger than me now, even if I die tomorrow. Alternately, I could live to be 118, but Diana will always be 37. She now has the ageless quality of art, existing outside of time, that Keats described so perfectly. As if I were standing on a boat, drifting inexorably down the river of no return, and Diana standing on shore, waving a bit condescendingly. It terrifies and yet gladdens me at the same time to think, for example, that the Meninas, if I go to the Prado in 2030 or so, will still be there, unchanged from the time I first saw them in March 2001, a time that itself seems so lost and gone, so dreadfully innocent.

I remember when Diana died. It was a Saturday night, and I was working at the paper. The news came over the wire very late in our time zone; it wasn't immediately clear she was dead, just badly injured. We remade what we could for the late editions, and went home.

I was starting a long weekend: I think I had taken an extra day off or something. I did not volunteer to come in and work extra, and later I felt guilty, when I saw how big the story really was, like I had missed the great newspaper story of my generation or something. At the time it did not seem that important to me, to be honest. She was a princess; she had died. Did it really mean more than that? It was a kind of mass hysteria, this outpouring of grief. It seemed slightly unreal to me at the time, and even more so later. It changed nothing, unlike, say 9/11, which seems to draw a sharp line between now and then. And yet.

The big events of what I now think of as the real beginning of my adult life were clustered around the time of Diana's death, or so it seems in hindsight. My friend Caroline had died the September before, claimed by ovarian cancer at age 31. We moved into the stone house in late March of 1997. We went to Paris that May, the first of a series of European forays. Garth arrived the following May, in 1998.

And now, looking back on that time, I would not say that I am old, but looking back, I can say with certainty that I am no longer young.

I find my thoughts returning to Jane Smiley, who, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, begins her preface to Persuasion thus: "When I first read this book, I was younger than all the characters. Now I am older than all of them, and older than Jane Austen when she died."