The proud seal for the Buffalo Seminary, “Western New York’s Only Independent College Preparatory School for Girls”

A few years back, Kato Kaelin (OJ Simpson’s noted house-guest) was being interviewed by Jay Leno, who asked Kaelin how he dealt with all of the derision and mockery he’d received. “My old friends were with me. You can’t make new old friends,” he said, with a wisdom I hadn’t anticipated.

I think of that line a lot.

It seems perhaps too obvious even to note, but you have to be well into middle age before you can have the experience of enjoying things that go on and on for a very long time, like decades-long friendship, and like loyalty that lasts even when you are being a problem, and like the way a city like Buffalo, NY – its people and indeed the neighborhoods themselves, too, it seems – can remember and welcome you.

– Photo by Miles Basil