I barely remember what was in that “Letter,” though  I can still see the writer, Renata Adler, appearing by the edge of U.S. Highway 80.

I do recall how strikingly out of place she seemed, on its rough and rocky shoulder, crowded with disheveled marchers, and lined with armed troops eyeing the nearby scrub forests for snipers.

Adler looked as if she had been plucked from a stroll on Fifth Avenue and teleported to Alabama, in a colorful and almost slinky sheath dress, with a broad voguish hat bending under the stray breezes, notebook in hand.

We talked for just a few minutes. It’s a good article. Only time my name ever appeared in the New Yorker, as far as I know.

I think you can read it for free.

And there’s more: on Jan. 18 I was asked to speak to the good people of Life’s Journey UCC Church in Burlington NC, and tell them the title story from my memoir, “Eating Dr. King’s Dinner.”

Of course, I didn’t get to go to Burl-Ing ton, which is about 40 miles west of Durham.  Instead, I ZOOMed in from home in Durham; that’s This American (Pandemic) Life, 2021.

but we had a good time. I did my best to tell my Selma story,

and explain how for a long time after that year in Selma, it had a happy ending. But then, in 2013, that ending was erased, and the story of fighting for voting resumed.

Only this time, the wear and tear of age had me on the sidelines, but still connected, reminding the young that this continuing story is now theirs too, and it was their turn, not yet to tell it but to write the decisive next chapters with their lives.

The video of the talk is there, for free.