When I was in college, I became friends with Polly, an older woman who lived in the same apartment building as I did. She was actually about my father's age, and I considered her to be a spare mother. She was Norwegian and she was Lutheran, and equally both. She helped me edit some of the papers I wrote, gave general guidance about life and school and boys, and taught me by example that I could be more gracious and refined than I was by nature. Her late  husband had  been an attorney, so she was accustomed to rubbing shoulders with the elite of the community, and knew the importance of never being inappropriately dressed.  She once told me how quickly she could pack for a trip, and I wish I could remember the details. I'm pretty sure she said she could pack for Europe in half an hour. I kept in touch with her after college, and invited her to my wedding, five years after graduating. I asked her to pour the coffee/tea at our reception. (In those days, that was the way we did things: somebody cut the cake, somebody poured hot beverages, and somebody poured the punch. And that's all there was for a reception.) Anyway, Polly drove to our little town sixty miles from where she lived, and stayed at my sister's house. When we were going to go to the wedding rehearsal, she expressed concern about whether she needed to change her clothes. She was already dressed more nicely than any of the rest of us, and we assured her she was just fine the way she was. A few years later, she died from cancer, which seemed dreadfully unfair, because she had lived such a clean, upright life.