It is approaching blizzard weather today. I am really a little tired of winter by now. Shovel once, and an hour later it is time to shovel snow again. Not paying enough attention to outside weather I leave home in sneakers and it's a miracle that my feet aren't soaked through wading in the snow.

This afternoon I go mass at Saint Jame's Cathedral. It's always in the little chapel and the main church is closed up except for Sunday, but today I see a hearse and two black Cadillacs and remember something I heard about a funeral. So while Mass goes on in the little chapel, next door in the nave of the church the organ is booming.

The details? The funeral for a twenty-one year old. Steve, who was at the funeral tells me that the boy was sitting with his friends and they let him have a gun. His girlfriend had left him, he said, and so right there in their presence he shot himself. There is so much wrong with that story I don't know where to begin. Leave out the fact that at the funeral a girl who spoke introduced herself as his friend of fourteen years who had dated him for three. She said he was her rock and she didn't know what she'd do without him.