It’s going to rain soon. An old friend stayed with me over the weekend, and now she has returned to the city to which I always intend to return, but never seem to – San Francisco.

I know she is gone, but I keep seeing her everywhere – once in the revolving rotisserie door of the station staircase, once framed in candlelight negative in the glass window of a train, once talking trackside on a cell phone, once wearing ballet shoes like toy boats. The city is scattered with her stand-ins.

My mother and I discussed the things we forget the other day. We didn’t talk about the things that, in compensation, you remember more than once.