A birthday

Deborah Clark meant little to me when last we passed one another between classes on 30 January 1968—we were only acquaintances—but that night she arbitrarily secured a place in my memory when she became the first of my contemporaries I knew to have died: a little over a mile from my home, of blunt-force trauma in an automobile accident. She’d be sixty-eight today. I retrieved this artifact from the accident site a few days later, and have morbidly retained it for over half a century.