It is Saturday at 4:30 a.m.-- not much daylight yet, but the birds are singing hard, and I am trying to enjoy them. I'm up early because I had a vivid dream about my friend Jilline. Though she has been dead for nearly 20 years, she regularly haunts me; and last night's dream was wrenching in its simplicity . . . walking together down a New York City street, as we did so often in real life; idle talk about clothes; the plainness of our bond, none of the "how I long to be an artist" emoting that we also did so often in real life . . . this time just two friends in their summer dresses, window-shopping.

Today is my 33rd wedding anniversary, and perhaps that's why Jilline was visiting me again. On the hot morning that Tom and I got married, she rose from her seat, statuesque and hilarious in the prim confines of that old Friends meetinghouse. She winked at me from across the room, then read a passage from Paradise Lost, complex and gorgeous and heartfelt but also a private joke between us, given my not-yet-come-to-terms-with-Milton crabbiness in those days. She teased my dad at the reception, and they kept slipping ice cubes down one another's collar. Years tumbled by and she sat with me beside a lake with my firstborn son and told me that my new baby looked like Edward G. Robinson. She stood at the rail of a New York ferry and pointed out the Statue of Liberty to my secondborn son. Later, in his excitement, he drew a map of the city in which Jilline loomed just as tall as the Lady with the Lamp. She wandered the Roman ghetto with me and she wise-cracked with Italian guys in her New Jersey mobster accent and she worshipped with me at the tomb of Keats. She wrote me letter upon letter upon letter, none of which I've been able to bring myself to reread. And then, quite suddenly, she was dead.

I didn't expect to enter today with such a burst of melancholy. Yet despite the sadness, I am always glad to meet Jilline in my dreams. She was the friend who taught me to see my desperate need to make art as part of the comedy of being human. She showed me how to work, and she made me understand that being an artist means being alive in the moment . . . and then she died.

Yet the alive stays alive in her hauntings. Today I have been married for 33 years. Jilline, if she were in the world, would be on the phone, singing some goofy 1950s nightclub song to us. A dress would arrive in the mail--a bargain from T. J. Maxx that she has decided will look perfect on me. She appears without warning, rushes through the door in a cloud of cheap tulle, leaving lipstick stains on Tom, declaiming Shakespeare, carrying on, making a scene, hogging the spotlight, loving us madly.

When you live long enough, your ghosts start throwing their own parties. And you have to go. You can't decide to stay home and turn in early, even though you know the ghosts will make you stay up all night and someone downstairs will call the cops on account of the noise.

Afterward, sleepless, you wander home through the grimy eloquent streets. An early-morning train squeals its brakes, and a pair of pigeons flutters up from their roost on a fire escape. The air smells of grit and all-night diners, and the soles of your shoes echo on the pavement.