The Last Time I Saw Her

The last time I saw Mei-Ling was about three weeks before she died. We had coffee at the place on Broadway Market she liked and talked for two hours about something she had been reading about deep time — geological time, the slowness of it, the way mountains were once sea floors. She was completely absorbed in the idea and it absorbed me too. That is what she was like. She made the things she cared about interesting to other people without trying to. I keep thinking about that conversation.