She was born just a couple miles from where I grew up, it turns out, though I didn’t know that until I looked it up just now. I knew, but had forgotten, that she initially enrolled at my alma mater, but left after just one semester, having failed the majority of her writing assignments, depleted all the money she’d saved, and—maybe most surprising in hindsight—been rejected by the college newspaper. Later, she enrolled at (and graduated from) a university just up the road from where I live now, worked in a department store three blocks from here, was buried in a cemetery you can see my house from, and posthumously had her childhood home (in the neighborhood where my elementary school sat but, more famously, across the street from Phil Donahue’s house) named to the National Register of Historic Places. This isn’t really about her, though—at least it’s not about how I admired or emulated her, or how many commonalities or crossed paths we shared. It’s more what we didn’t have in common that has me thinking about her now. ..