You know, some days it’s all pity, some days it’s all scorn. Though they are so closely related it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between them.

Wednesday I had a break between classes and took a stroll around the Back Bay. And after admiring the Hancock, which looked smashing against a stormy sky, and some stonework on the Old South Church I hadn’t noticed before, I took a stroll down Commonwealth Ave., and sat for a spell on a park bench.

There are days, as I said. And this was one. You know, the sun was out—in and out, but out—for the first time in two weeks, or something utterly ridiculous, and you know how people are. They forget themselves. And everywhere I looked people were rushing around, like they had someplace else to be. It seems like nowadays you are hardly ever where you are.

There were a couple of dog walkers who went about their task with utter joylessness. And you’ve got to admit that if you can walk dogs joylessly, you can do just about anything joylessly. It was impressive in its way. There was a neatly attired jogger with a tennis racket sticking out of her backpack. She was wearing the ubiquitous white ipod earphones, and looked determined in her joylessness, as well.

A pinched-face yuppie yammering on his cell. Two pumped-up gym bunnies jogging by trying to show the world how str8-acting they can be. And the construction worker who joined me on my bench, methodically, meticulously unpacking his methodically, meticulously packed sack lunch piece by crinkly, crunchy piece over the course of an endless half hour.

And there I was joylessly watching all this determined joylessness joylessly unfold before my eyes. Thinking, of myself as much as those around me: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Every gesture, every thought, every breath. All in vain.

But this is the danger of sitting on park benches. They should be required to post some sort of warning on them.

I’d gone to see Poseidon with my friend Robert over the weekend, and I thought about the stereotypes we were supposed to be happy to see survive in the end. And now, as I watched the self-style stereotypes around me, I thought, please God, let me die alone. And that’s what you get from watching Hollywood disaster movies. It’s not just that I don’t want to be part of the body count on the nightly news. The real reason is I don’t want some other drama queen stealing the scene. I’m only gonna die once. It’s my freakin swan song.

So, as you can see, last Wednesday I had only contempt. No pity. Except for dogs.

I got up and moved on, thinking about how hard we work to eliminate the magic in life, but how sometimes it still manages to slip under the radar. Occasionally things happen that shake up the manufactured and painstakingly maintained mundanity of our thoroughly modern lives.

For example. I have been receiving communiqués from my past, a boatload of them all at once, from all corners of the globe. From places as unlikely and disparate as Paris, France and Lawrence Kansas; Budapest, Hungary and Hobart, Tasmania. From friends and lovers, old students and teachers. From different points along my path. And all these messages came thundering in over an utterly random two-week period. After years, nearly a decade in a couple of cases, of silence.

You know, what is that?

No, really. What is it?