I flew to my father’s funeral in Belfast in the hope I might discover why I was flying to my father’s funeral in Belfast.

In June Bobby Kennedy was killed. My thirty-six ladies wondered what was happening to the world but they agreed you have to carry on, that education was the only road to sanity.

For eight years I traveled on the Staten Island Ferry. I would take the RR train from Brooklyn to Whitehall Street in Manhattan, walk to the terminal, slip a nickel into a turnstile slot, buy coffee and a doughnut, plain no sugar, and wait on a bench with a newspaper filled with yesterday’s disasters.