I read to AIDS patients. It is a tender experience. When I told this to an out of town editor her response was a bland, "Nice."

Editors are an aware and busy lot. Perhaps because of that they often show emotion slowly - if at all. Writers, particularly poets, novelist and even columnists show emotion for a living.

"I wouldn't say 'nice,' " I said, "maybe 'tender.' "

We were having this conversation on the telephone. After hanging up I thought, 'tender' and 'nice.'

One day I read "Riverday, the Day the Man Jumps in The River." It is about suicide thwarted by friends from a homeless camp. When I finished a man in a wheelchair asked, "Have you ever been depressed?"

When first I came to read I was introduced to a modern Catholic nun. She wore street clothes and earrings and smiled warmly. She told me, "We demystify death here." I had asked, "What will happen if I cry?"

"You might give someone else a chance to cry." She paused, then added, "They think anything you might think."

"Yes," I told the man, "I have been depressed."

He said he had been terribly depressed. "I know I will never walk again, and I know I have to live here." He moved one arm around overhead and back down to his lap. We were on a balcony over a pleasant street, under a huge magnolia tree. He rolled his chair back and turned towards the tree. After a moment he said, "I don't think you could live in a hobo camp with AIDS." In the story I had just read, a sixteen-year-old white boy and a black man lived in such a camp under the bridge.

He rocked his chair and said, "Did you see somebody? For your depression, I mean, or just get over it?"

"I see a woman still," I told my new friend. "When I started getting better, I said to her, 'I had hardly known how depressed I had been.' "

Visitors arrived and I left the balcony to them and went below. Through kitchen windows I saw my bicycle chained near a huge fig tree. The tree bulged with fruit. A black woman carrying laundry passed and said, "They sweet, too." She gave me a small plastic bag.

A beige suited white woman touched my arm and asked if I would co-witness AIDS Law documents for two new people.

In one room beside an open window sat a silent boy of about nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

In another room a boy of similar years sat up in his new bed and greeted us. He was from Big Mamou and told us of the Creole custom of dropping first names when speaking. "You would be 'Earl,' not 'Leonard,' not 'Leonard Earl,' " he said.

I carried my end of the conversation wishing we were not here, doing what we were doing. I shifted my weight and kicked a pair of gargantuan tennis shoes sitting on the floor near his bed. It was a set-up for a conversation repeated in damn near every male's life. I wanted to say, should have said, "You got feet big enough to fill those shoes?" but I didn't. I feared it sounded sexy. I'd never before thought much about that, but sexy seemed out of place now.

We said good bye and I went outside. Standing beside my bike, I looked at the big fig tree and started filling the plastic bag. The leaves were thick and scratchy. I closed my eyes and felt tears dropping on the backs of my hands.