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I got a beautiful ten-page letter from Elihu, all about how he feels about turning 30 and visiting San Francisco (he didn’t fall in love with it) and working on Wall Street (he’s been at Goldman, Sachs a year now) despite still being a radical at heart.

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In the Village Voice, I caught a personals ad from a guy in Flushing who has to be Brad. He said he was 28. Somehow he went from being five years older than me when I was 18 to two years younger now. Poor Brad: he’ll never grow up.

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“I absolutely believe no university professor should condone homosexuality,” he said, “and I would do everything in my power to see that those professors are fired.” I told him I am a Broward Community College teacher and I condone homosexuality.

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I got a letter from George. His last paragraph: “Never say that I told you this, but I’m not happy in marriage. There seems no way to talk about it. I feel sort of out of it now.” Poor George – and his poor wife. Maybe they rushed into things too fast.

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I’d feel a lot better if I knew that Richard Simmons gets depressed, too.

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Last night, while driving to Tamarac in a thunderstorm, I saw my first shooting star, one of the annual Perseid meteor showers. If you’re supposed to wish on a shooting star, I didn’t – because all the wishes that I wanted to come true have come true.

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I just realized that today’s entry closes a dozen years of this diary. A week ago I was flying from Washington to Fort Lauderdale; just about this time we were landing at our stopover in Tampa. Now, unlike then, I know where I’m going – or rather, staying

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I feel I’m surrounded by supportive, loving friends here and that I’m returning to a hostile or indifferent world. . . Looking back, I know how much I’ve experienced here in Virginia and I see the last four weeks as a very special time in my life.