Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 3/14/20: I didn't want to see them.

Jacob Lawrence, "The Life of Harriet Tubman No. 10" (1940) — Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Harriet Tubman No. 10. Harriet Tubman was between twenty and twenty-five years of age at the time of her escape. She was now alone. She turned her face toward the North, and fixing her eyes on the guiding star, she started on her long, lonely journey. (1940)

March 14, 2020:

I didn't want to see them.

Not the adults.

It was my friends I hoped to encounter, so that as the jaws of those two elderly former sitters dropped I declined to acknowledge them, although it's clear they recognized me. Behind the butterfly handlebars of a week-old Schwinn Stingray, at the apogee of my first there-and-back-again across town.