Father Kelleher, my old friend, once said that at the bar over the railroad station in Tokyo when I was turning 21.

“Most Westerners think that’s a blessing, actually it’s a curse,” he said, and swallowed another Scotch.

Father was a Jesuit brother at Sophia University. Sophia was, and is today, in Tokyo, where I was in the ’50s, spending my nights reading James Joyce’s “The Dead” instead of bar hopping.

All of these things, conversations full of sentences that spilled out in strange beautiful places like that bar where he and others came together one rainy night, keep coming back to me in the middle of these November nights that end with early darkness, or in phone conversations like one with my daughter.

“It’s actually a curse,” Father said, and then he ordered us another scotch and laughed and I laughed and everyone around us at the other tables laughed.

Nick Lorre and Freddy Blackman were my close friends from the 6403 base in Fuchu, a small town base an hour away.

They were there to help me celebrate my 21st birthday. It was so long ago.

I was so young and didn’t know much of anything except that red-haired girl who sat under the red paper lantern across the room and kept looking over the rim of her glass at me.

Sophia University was right in the middle of Tokyo. In telling this story, I had to try to remember that and a lot of smaller things. Somewhere in a drawer I have a tiny gold pin Sophia gave to their graduates. I was living here in Maine when I first wrote about that night and that girl in the restaurant above the Tokyo railroad station.

An old student from Sophia who I never knew found me on Facebook and sent it to me. Was she the girl with the glass to her lips? Interesting times.

I think she is probably passed to the other side now. Everybody there that rainy night is likely passed as well, and it has been left to me who became a writer just so I could keep their memories alive.

I went to Nick’s wedding in Brooklyn after the war that never ended, and Freddie and I met on a snowy night in Manhattan after that. I tried to find them since but failed. Maybe I’ll try again before I pass, or maybe on the “other side.”

“Interesting times” indeed. I quoted that line to my daughters and we laughed like everyone in that bar did that night, like the girl with the glass to her lips.

It all comes back again now out of the fog of these dark days that surround us. I won’t speak here of the death of all the dreams we just awoke from, because dreams of democracy, like the faces of old friends at a birthday party on a rainy night in Tokyo, will never fade.

They lay around us to the day we pass, don’t they? Like She, who found me on an escalator on a snowy night in Manhattan and put me in her pocket.

And the faces of the other ghosts: Father Kelleher, Nick Lorrie and old Freddie and yes, the sweet girl looking over her glass on an “interesting” rainy night in Tokyo.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.