October 1, 1995

DR. HENRY LEE, just back from Los Angeles, was still charged up from the O. J. Simpson trial. The forensic pathologist had spent the previous day giving testimony about evidence found at the murder scene. "What do you see that's different in the two photographs?" he asked pointing to a poster board with enlarged photos of a bloodied envelope, the one that had contained the eyeglasses that Ronald Goldman had been returning to Nicole Brown Simpson the night they were murdered.

THE baritone who cleans my building, Gene Howard, will perform this afternoon at 4, at Christ and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church on West 69th Street. I found this out while he was vacuuming the hallway, from a flier with his picture he had taped above the mailboxes. It was one of 500 fliers he has been spreading around the city as he scrubs, mops and polishes to pay for his recital. But he won't tell me exactly what he will sing from the works of Sibelius, Robert Owens, Rachmaninoff and Dorothy Rudd-Moore, a West Side composer who sets the poetry of African-Americans to music.

Scott Croteau was an A student, a star football player on his high school team in Maine, a popular yet modest teen-ager who carried note cards with phrases designed to push himself further. Three weeks ago, he was just as driven to commit suicide: he was found hanging from a tree with a bullet wound in his head.

HE UNITED STATES is not an easy country to figure out, even for Americans. So imagine how hard it must be for a Pope, any Pope, a man who as leader of the Roman Catholic Church spends much of his time within the walls of a miniature city-state where most of the people he sees every day are of the same faith and the same sex, and are ready to accept what he says as a matter of unassailable doctrine.

BACK in 1954, the segregationist doctrine of separate but equal appeared to have been slain by a nine-headed St. George known as the United States Supreme Court. In its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the justices overturned what had been for 60 years the legal underpinning of America's system of racial separation. Four decades later, though, a mixture of white resistance to integration, population shifts, an increasingly conservative judiciary and black impatience and political empowerment seem to be converting separate but equal from a dead dragon into a rising Phoenix.