Full Circle

Last night I was out for jazz with Aimee at Fusion Cafe. Lovely crowd: soccer moms and dads, bored but behaving children, little punk rock high school kids with their dramas, a wizened Texas farmer type and his wife who looked for all the world like she might not have ever seen such a thing, some hustling but overwhelmed counter staff, ... and some graduate students.

The band, The In Time Jazz Quartet was crackin', by the way. 1940's-early 50's style, heavy on the tenor sax. Hip as hip can be, man.

We overheard a woman talking about reading for her comps exams in Ecofeminism and Post-holocaust Literature (plus two other areas I didn't catch), and said to Aimee, "Hey, our tribe." One of my committee profs is on her committee, and he's still really hard to find around campus. Back to separate conversations. Later that evening a friend of Aimee's arrived who is also a friend of this woman, and the two groups merged. Comps-woman and I chatted. She's very smart, and a mother of three, and a bit hungry to get back to writing something other than annotations. I sympathized.

The Kicker: She was a freshman in the very first class I TA-ed, Introduction to the Humanities, my first semester of my PhD work (no one teaches first term, and I found the TA-thing a bit weird, actually, after all the teaching I had done). She remembered me. I didn't remember her. There were 120 students in that class, and she wasn't in my section. But there she sat, a visitation from the beginning.

So, this chapter has officially closed. In a rather classical way, I might add.