I may have mentioned at some point here that three decades ago I was unwisely entangled for a year with a Sweet Young Thang, fourteen years my junior, on the other side of the country. Not a bad person, but we proved to have irreconcilable generational/cultural/regional differences (“The Beatles were OK in their time, I guess, but they weren’t a patch on Guns N’ Roses”—and this South Carolina native/resident was the first person I ever heard pronounce the words ‘War of Northern Aggression’ unironically). There was talk of her perhaps relocating to sunny California, but this notion, along with the entanglement, fortunately did not survive my neglecting to call her on Valentine’s Day 1995, a dereliction that produced a hissy fit for the record books. The SYT was in law school during the thirteen months we were exchanging fluids, and her subsequent legal career was…well, I don’t want to be unfair to train wrecks, but let’s just say that following the revocation of her license to practice a dozen or fifteen years later, she deemed it politic to change her name and quit the state for Yankeeland. So yeah, dodged a hollow-point there.

Anyway, a little over three years before we first laid hands on one another, the SYT, then in her early twenties, opened her apartment door one evening to a man who forced his way inside, choked, bound, beat and raped her, burgling the premises on the way out (also: a pregnancy and an STD, both of which were successfully treated). The police investigation at the time struck her as desultory, and yielded no suspects. OK, fast forward to the other day: we aren’t connected on social media, but there are a couple of people on my feed who stay in touch with her, and her name appeared in an odd, ambiguous context that sent me firing up the ol’ search engine, and waddya know? Five years ago she got in touch with the PD in her old jurisdiction to enquire whether they had ever thought of bringing to bear modern genetic sleuthing techniques on her old case—and for a wonder, her old “rape kit” had been preserved, a match came up boxcars, and her assailant, seventy-one by that time, was duly located, arrested, charged, tried and convicted for the assault.

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.

cordially,