I can never keep it straight. The groundhog supplied the bad news, and the heavens supplied the snow, and the municipal government demonstrated a blend of foresight and preparedness reminiscent of Pearl Harbor Day. The snow came down white, turned gray as it passed my windows, and blackened on the streets and sidewalks, where it lay waiting, like all the rest of us, for warmer times.

“Snow,” Minna called out when it first began falling. “Can I go out and play in it, Evan?”

“Do you really think you want to?”

“Oh, it’s so beautiful,” she chirped, and ran down the stairs.

She came back a few minutes later. “It’s all dirty,” she said. “What happened to it?”

“ New York happened to it,” I told her.

“Well, I don’t like it,” she said. “I’ll sit on your lap and we can read Alice, Evan.”

She sat on my lap and I let her do the reading. She picked out a German edition of Through the Looking-Glass, Hans Gebhardt’s translation, and read the chapter about Humpty Dumpty, which works beautifully in German. I couldn’t pay too much attention to the words. She squirmed around a little on my lap, and I kept hearing re-runs of a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier with an old love.

“You’ll have to do something about Minna, Evan.”

“Minna? What’s wrong with Minna?”

“The whole situation. It’s not as if she were your daughter, you know. She’s just a child who lives with you. And she won’t be a child forever.”

“Well, only Peter Pan-”

“She’s growing up already, you know.”

“Huh?”

“She is, Evan. How old is she? Ten?”

“Nine. She’s not exactly eligible for Social Security yet.”

“Nine years old. You know, children are growing up a lot faster these days, Evan.”

“You sound like a Sunday supplement.”