Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

[re-write]thru my mind the remembrance of former joys past, which seem so much greater than the present. So tonight I thought of how on an evening like this, I would be sitting at my window, thinking just such thoughts as these, when I would suddenly hear a bounding step on the porch and Bill would burst in, shouting “Where’s Eph?”, and then we’d depart into the dusk on some adventure such as only green High School students can conceive and execute. Or else, I am sitting with (name is erased and the X and line are written over) X --- at the side of some rapids in Bedford Glens, where by the light of a brilliant moon I am trying to read aloud from the “Rubaiyat”; and with that comes the remembrance of another afternoon in the Glens, when he(looks like she was erased and he is written over) had gone up on the hillside to pick flowers, and I was trying to find him (looks like her was erased and him is written over) with my eye; and he (looks like she was erased and he is written over), feeling my anxiety called and waved to me. And in a flood come the conglomerate memories of my first spring in Cleveland; of truancies with Kaiser, who taught me to loaf, of bizarre evenings at the Euclid villa where I cut up with Mary and May (the full-time waittresses(sic)