One day a husband, a wife, and five children; the next day filling emptiness with emptiness: a missing husband, and a despairing family trying to make sense of the abruptness of a tragedy that breaks up the usual, the familiar. My father had left home for work at his regular time, around 6:30 a.m. "He had a tight morning booked with meetings with government officials, and in the afternoon he planned to take care of his personal business at his office," according to the report that his secretary gave to the police later that day. My father was a political activist, and had been since his college years. He came from a family in which most of the men had been statesmen and legislators. He was committed to the cause of human rights, which in Colombia is something to struggle for, not just dream about. Where anarchy rules, this can mean the most basic of human rights: the right to stay alive.

Someone once told me "find a place where you feel God and go there often," advice I follow to Elkins Park when I need a retreat from the world. There are many places there I feel God, though the old rose garden is my favorite.

One hundred years before we met Marilyn Monroe, another superstar, Adah Isaacs Menken, strolled into Napoleon Sarony's Manhattan photo studio at 630 Broadway. By 1866, the year of the shoot, Menken's name resonated in New York, California, London, and Paris. Both photographers captured their subjects' playfulness, plus the "it" or universal sex appeal, that je ne sais quois the French marvel at rather than define. Adah Menken's knack for getting publicity rivaled P.T. Barnum's.