Can’t Figure It: South African writer Nadine...

Can’t Figure It: South African writer Nadine Gordimer, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, sees more distance between blacks and whites in the United States than in South Africa. “I don’t know what is the explanation,” she said Tuesday in Amherst, Mass. Gordimer, 67, said that during regular visits to this country over the past 20 years, her white acquaintances rarely introduce her to black people--”very different from my experience at home.”

At Last: Six Norwegian seamen jailed in New York on public drunkenness charges while on a visit to re-create Leif Eriksson’s voyage to the New World have been cleared--nearly 100 years after their arrest. Judge Martin Karopkin dismissed the charges Tuesday, one day before Leif Eriksson Day. “It’s a rather touching story,” said Odd Wibe, Norway’s deputy consul general in New York. “We never dreamed of such an outcome, but it’s wonderful.”

I Know You: President Bush knows his country music. And he knows his country musicians pretty well, too, says singer George Jones. The President greeted people backstage last week at a country music awards show in Nashville, Tenn., and Jones was impressed by Bush’s memory: “We had written him a letter a while back thanking him for a picture we got from him. I had since forgot about it. He shook my hand and said, ‘It sure is nice to meet you and thanks for the nice letter (you) sent.’ ”

The Man With Three Lives: Norman Lewiston’s Stanford University Medical Center colleagues believed his work was his whole life. That is, until his death. Then, three widows came forward. “I don’t know where he found the time,” said a spokesman for the hospital where the 52-year-old doctor worked when he wasn’t teaching pediatrics. Lewiston, shy and unassuming, juggled three homes and three wives--two in the San Francisco Bay area and one in Southern California: It seems each woman thought he was putting in long hours on the job. Lewiston died of a heart attack Aug. 6.