After archiving photos taken in the Ewing & Muriel Kauffman Memorial Garden, I picked up Haruki Murakami's "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman", a collection of twenty-four short stories, to gobble up more lines while feeling like a poor slice of Wonder bread in a broken toaster stuffed in a giant 800-degree brick oven. It was that hot. I had to read the concluding line in "The Year of Spaghetti" out loud, three times, before the meaning of it vaporizing into the sizzling air.

Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?

The Ewing & Muriel Kauffman Memorial Garden, located near Country Plaza in Kansas City, is a part of Kauffman Legacy Park associated with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The garden, featuring fountains, well-maintained flower beds with annual plantings, and bronze sculptures by Tom Corbin, is also the grave-site of Ewing and Muriel Kauffman.