Time

Yesterday I had a chance to spend time with a visiting professor – someone whom I hadn’t seen since graduate school in the 70s. This man had single-handedly saved my plummeting confidence in academia. I eventually did leave academia for a while, but it was then a deliberate rather than desperate move.

The prof is now retired and he splits his time between Paris and SF (not a bad lineup of cities I must admit). That is fitting for a person who in my mind is sort of a poetic hero, infused with the worship one reserves for the leaders in one’s life (he doesn’t know that I feel this way about him).

People who save us from the worst aspects of ourselves are indeed heroes. But over time, they disappear and new heroes come to replace them. What a luxury it was to meet again, 28 years later. I never could quite say thank you in the way that I wanted to. Though as I listened to his little impromptu jazz piano playing later in the evening, I thought it didn’t matter. He probably wouldn’t have understood anyway. People of that type are often so personally modest that they do not have a sense of their own force vis-à-vis others.

[a photo of said prof, playing jazz---->]