All day yesterday I cowered in my condo.  That’s what you do when you are waiting for a post-tropical cyclone to cut a destructive swath up the entire eastern seaboard and you live alone, are alone. But, I wasn’t alone, really. Some 60 million other people were also cowering in their homes.

Inside a unit so small I can see every room from my couch, I watched Fox News from morning until night. Although I can’t help but feel disdain for a station whose on-air personalities include Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, and Greta Van Susteren, I had no choice but to watch it: my cable box remained stuck on Channel 5 after the Emergency Alert System broadcast a noisy warning, and I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix the problem until just before the power went out. I confess, though, that there lives in me a daft conspiracist who thought perhaps there had been some kind of backroom deal between the greedy media giant Comcast and the ultra-conservative station that left Comcast customers with only one option if they wanted to watch the storm coverage.

It is not a good idea to watch the news while you are waiting for the worst to happen because it gives you terrible new ideas about what that worst event could be. For me, it was the possibility of a splintering utility pole crashing through a roof that feels like it sits a few feet above my head.

Nor is it a good idea to avoid the news when you are waiting for the worst to happen. Staying glued to the set gave me the sense that I had a modicum of control over my fate, which made the possibility of impending doom easier to bear. Perhaps that is why I felt a great sense of relief when my street, and condo, went dark at around 11 pm and candles began to flicker in the windows of my neighbors. I no longer had to worry about when, exactly, I would lose power, and I fell quickly to sleep.

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Since Wednesday, I have been at a conference in Richmond, Virginia, and I have found that I can be very charming. In-drawn and shy by nature, I get to practice safe extraversion at these kinds of events, and, when this exhausts me, as it inevitably does, I can sneak back to my room and hole up.

Yesterday, I had the bus driver all to myself for a ten-block ride, and we were the best of friends by the time I got off. I learned about his hapless son, and he learned that I could be a sympathetic listener. Once at the Convention Center, I chatted up two gentlemen from Ohio, and, when I saw them again this morning on the bus, I shouted “hi, you two” as I walked down the aisle. If you knew me, you would laugh at the thought of this easy-breezy familiarity.

Then, at dinner last night, I withdrew behind my sunglasses and prepared for a solitary meal, which it was but for the young waiter who, when he handed me the menu, commented that I must be a movie star. This drew a delighted giggle, and I said something to him about trying to hide from my adoring fans. It was a more genuine kind of openness, mine, one where I had been so startled by such a sweet exchange that I didn’t have time to assume a pose.

When he gave me the check, I saw there was a separate slip of paper with only an X and a _________________________ on it. I signed my first name, wrote “Have a wonderful life!,” and said, “Please don’t tell anyone else I’m here” when I handed him my autograph.

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Years ago, when I first read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, I was stunned by it. I was especially affected by the disembodied voice of the character at the center of the novel, Addie Bundren, and was compelled to commit to memory some of what she said. “I feel my body, my bones and flesh beginning to part and open upon the alone,” she tells us, “and the process of coming unalone is terrible.” The last words of this line are themselves terrible, and somehow, even then, I understood through poesy what I would not have been able to bear otherwise.

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I am aging in measurable and accelerated ways. I have more lines and rivulets on my face and décolletage; more brown spots almost everywhere; and thinner, grayer hair. Even with glasses I no longer see well.

My spirit has gone gray, too. When I was younger, I believed it was my responsibility, if not my destiny, to endure burden and suffering wherever I might find it, and, to that end, I invited all manner of person and experience into my life. Nothing has aged me more profoundly, though, than the betrayals I have experienced over my years. Had I known from the very start that they would accrete and eventually hobble, perhaps I would have been more careful about the people I allowed to walk through my front door.

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