My friends usually keep their distance when I retu rn from an assignment. They check in by phone but avoid personal contact like
the plague they assume I'm carrying. They'd rather wait a few weeks before setting a dinner date. Once, a studio car picked me up at the airport and took me directly to the broadcast center where I was to report on my fifty days inside an African war zone. The makeup artist took one look at me and said, nOh, dear, I've never worked on a corpse before. How did you get so yellow and blue?" I didn't say anything. He had plenty to do and little time to do it in. But I wanted to tell him the whole story.
