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Last Sunday, I opened the paper to find almost a full page devoted to a burning question: How do Britons pronounce the word scone?

I’d been under the impression that everybody who isn’t me pronounced it—as the article explained it—so it rhymes with gone. I’m not sure how useful that is, since for all I know the pronunciation of gone shifts from region to country to class to ethnic group. I pronounce it gawn, although I don’t drag out the W. The pronunciation they’re relying on is, I think, something closer to gohn. Or is that gahn?

English is such a mess.

Still, gone is a good enough place to start. Let’s leave it there for a minute or three.

Irrelevant photo: A bunch of junk I picked up in a few minutes on the beach, mostly plastic rope from fishing nets and a few other bits…

This morning I wanted to remember Kahlil Gibran’s writing about children because I have been feeling lately like a life raft where all the people who were hanging on have swum away but they don’t want me to pull up anchor yet because they might need to come back and it was that feeling of needing to know my place that made me get up and find my old copy of The Prophet.

Mine was given to me by a strange friend in college. She wrote long quotes inside the front and back cover, things she thought had meaning to the two of us. I think she was a little in love with me. She was very short with long hair, parted in the middle. She lived two doors down in my dorm with a woman who was also my friend and who played the guitar late into the night…