many, many years ago ...

Many, many years ago ... before Facebook, blogging, email, wikipedia, youtube, before hideous mobile phone cases and silly ringtones no one ever uses, before internet telephony, before Nokia, before pagers, before the internet, before fax machines and IBM automatic typewriters, before hiphop and R and B and before disco even, before the Eraserheads and Oasis and while the Beatles were bickering but together, when Zimbabwe was South Rhodesia, before the dismantling of apartheid, when the twin towers of the World Trade Center rested on a drawing board, before Tetrapaks, before the moon landing and Apollo 13, before Skylab and Soyuz, before Ebola and AIDS, before the fall of Saigon, before Cory and Ninoy and Edsa, when Ferdinand Marcos was the youthful new hope for the future, before Martial Law ... a little star was born.

(And many years later, she recognized her guardian angel in a shop window in Bologna, off Piazza Maggiore. Woof!)