English 145 (4): Most Unlonely Teacher

I walk the campus every Monday before class—always a new direction, always some memory that I am stalking. Yesterday I went the length of Locust Walk and out toward West Philadelphia, where a mod-looking bowling alley has been slipped inside a residential street and the Dental School where I once worked has the face of new authority. At the corner of 42nd and Spruce I was besieged by memories of a friend with whom I shared a passion for Russian history. The room where he kept his books. The pea soup that he made from his mother's recipe. His fascination with Tolstoy.

By the time I reached the Writers House, I was feeling melancholy. J met me downstairs. S met me upstairs. K arrived with a tiny, days-old kitten tucked into the collar beneath her chin. "They call him Wild Bill," she told me, "and I think he likes my bling," for this found refugee from the streets of West Philly had dug his claw in deep to her necklace chain and was, it seemed, intent on staying.

The past is gone, except that it leans upon our present day, except that we write it into our stories, except that it tangles into our imaginations and hovers near. The past is a yearning, and now is the bowling alley, the cleaned-up Spruce, the Writers House, the stairs, the room, Wild Bill in K's collar, and the email that arrives from J, in the evening after class. It includes a bit of found memoir that, he says, he thinks I might like. It includes the line, "most unlonely teacher."

Yes. Certainly.