The wonder years

In college I coined the idea that a syllabus is but a menu. You choose from it, because you don't want to do everything listed there, and even if you did, it wouldn't be possible. You would burst. In my day, nearly every professor required written responses to the week's reading. Usually you had to post them by 9 P.M. the night before the class met. Furthermore, you were supposed to read all your peers' responses. For me, there was no good time to do this: whenever I did schoolwork, I had just eaten, or would soon eat. The responses were dense; sense was absent from them. I could not stomach the stuff.

My own responses were letters to the editor. One week we read Things fall apart. Hobbs had just sent me a devastating New York Times Magazine article about the new violence of elephants in Africa. Their communities were breaking down. It was the most fitting, found response to Things fall apart, so I forwarded the piece to my professor, and went to work.

I was a regular at Harriman conferences, working every table. I carried a wine opener in each pocket. I tore Uzbekh bread with my hands, because the knives were dull. Those in attendance did not understand that we were a political institute, not a restaurant. If the event was on 15, I took the stairs to and from the staging Arena on 12, to gather my wits about me. I was a college girl in a sweater running a show. I had people folding brochures. The paper was still hot from the copy machine, for which I knew all the codes. At the time, Katya hated her job on the Island. She quit every day but did not tell her boss. In D.C., A. kept a post-it note on her windowsill with a tiny box for each remaining day in our nation's capital; each night she crossed out a box and dreamt of New York.

But I was rampant, high-strung but relentless. I dealt blows amidst the tablecloths and crates of wine. What I lacked in patience, I made up in vision. I felt fruitful, in pursuit of the tea thief, in flight from the usual suspects. In the small of the night, I wrote bride stories for all the king's boys, ignoring the town drunks in the collective kitchen. I could have spun a business of it. I wonder why I did not.