Every day it gets a little harder to keep the faith. I’m trying. But I’m failing more than succeeding. I live in two separate worlds. The world around me. The world in which I exist every day. My house. My street. All the places I visit. The people I know. The people I see. The people I text and e-mail and talk to. Old friends. New friends. I don’t see hate or division in my very small world.

Hanging on by a thread. Getting through the days. Waking up each morning from half sleep and vivid dreams, which vanish in the light. It’s gray light mostly. And rain. There’s been so much rain…

He walks up the stairs from his basement office, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes closer to evening, and hands me a few typewritten pages, which have come to be the best part of my day. The pages, two, sometimes three, are stapled together. On page 1 in big, bold letters is always the title, and underneath are the date and his name, Bruce Beckham.

I am writing this on the last day of March. The “In like a lion, out like a lamb” month. But that was before. When the lions of March were a sweet myth with an exit date.

March? April? Tuesday? Friday? The days blur now. And they inch along. “Is it time for lunch?” “Is it 5 o’clock, yet?” And yet, come night, each day feels too short somehow. Stunted. Where did it go? What did I do today?

It’s Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day as I write this, 6 a.m., dark still. I live on a busy street, where on a normal morning, I would have heard sirens already. I haven’t heard sirens in days. After Sept. 11, 2001, when the world was quiet like this, we gathered in our small downtown, holding candles, holding each other. We gathered in churches, restaurants, and bars. In groups we felt buffered. In groups we felt hope.

It’s different this time.

I don’t know why it dogs me, why it feels so important to know who my father was before he was my father. He died 15 years ago. Shouldn’t I be over wanting to understand the man who came home from combat and married my mother? “Tell me about the war, Dad,” I asked him when I was a child, a teenager, a young adult and an old adult. “No,” he said every time. “No.”

There’s a guy and he makes music at a beach bar, Flora-Bama, a one-of-a-kind, sprawling, right out of the movies, wooden roadhouse so named because it straddles the state line that separates Florida and Alabama.But this guy, Bat Bennett, never straddles. He jumps into every song, all kinds of songs — country, rock, oldies, the Beatles, Sting, John Denver, Neil Diamond. From Van Morrison to the von Trapps, he plays it. He sings it. And he rocks it.He stands on a stage, any stage — Flora-Bama has five — and with just his guitar makes time and place and whatever bad things that are happening in the outside world disappear…

We dressed up for the occasion. Not to the nines, but close. My husband wore a suit and tie, a white shirt with cuff links, a black felt fedora, and a gray wool coat. I wore black: black pants, shirt, boots, coat, gloves, and a wide-brimmed red hat…