257/365 Rowena&Nanette

Wiry duo, fiercely coupled,
Scottish Fulbrights landing
in Happy Valley: not exactly the
America of TV movies.

But you made the best of it:
formidable squash players
yet generous teachers for
student-players of all ages.

One quick to laugh, horse-like
and accented, the other flashing
black eyes in appreciation.

256/365 Jodi

Daughters thick as thieves, sharing initial
initials for all of elementary school.

During sleepover prep, we drank coffee and
shared histories: family dynamics, college
expectations, husband foibles (fondly, of course).

Daughters parted, but our friendship stuck,
slowing only because the occasion of
pick-up--drop-off meant no more easy crossings.

255/365 Judy S

Our kids near-same ages, we shared
child-minding and conversation:

You met your husband at summer camp,
sharing German just one way you connected:

Told me, too, of affairs, grad-school plans,
new recipes, old boyfriends, new Montessori
program for your middle child, only son:

I still make your spaghetti pie.

254/365 Becky

My first farm visit was
your first-grade
birthday: I'd been told
not by you
your dad had a pig farm.

I imagined pigs in tidy rows
light straw like Wilbur.

I never saw the barn
but your entire family's
orderliness suggests that
what I knew from fiction
must-indeed be fact.

252/365 Dawn K

Sharing an efficiency in
Staten Island, we battled
cockroaches in the kitchen
(really a closet with
a stove), suffered the
silence of the landlord
("super" as they say
in New York). You
stayed after my green
station-wagon departure, succeeding in
one Big City, then
City of Brotherly Love.

251/365 Pat C

King-sized bed:
two twin box-springs
with a single expanse of
mattress
filled almost
the entire room, just
a dresser
and shelf with winter sweaters.

Such plenty!

Impressive corraling of space,
time, material world:
invitation to any
sweet young femme with a
brain and a few
bucks: you're finally there.

250/365 Mara

Farm House
unlikely coupling
potlucks with Jews
(Do you walk on
campus? you asked.)

Jersey Shore
unknowingly drinking
Bob's expensive wine
(And you didn't even
finish it? he yelled.)

JFK Airport
desperately departing
post-doc to Zurich
(next life phase obviously
bumping into a future
we couldn't plan to share)

249/365 Rayome

Sixth desk from teacher's, that
grade we rotated seats, signaling
challenges for
us to meet, like art-appreciation we
all learned from a pompadoured florist, father to no
student, elegant organist for mysterious congregation
and dweller in an apartment like no
teacher I knew. Once, you said we were
alike.

248/365 Linda C

Why in your
later life do
you want to teach
again?

Junior High Music was it last time?
Junior College English this time?

You must be competent but
undecided, easy to work
with but perhaps not for?

Or other way around?
Oddly, sharing offices
doesn't help one
find answers.

247/365 Nes

Big as the basketball you love,
your heart's hidden beneath.

Orange as the basketball you love,
your hair's hanging behind.

Finding humor everywhere:
granddaughter's antics, Laura's
admonitions, patients' aches and
pains, golfing buddies' chunks
and mulligans, The College of's
new name (old one'd been
good enough for us, goddammit!).

246/365 Lori

How long at that piano? You
play it like a friend, a
long-time companion, utensil
familiar as a cutting
board, a wrench: hands like
tools cut music out of
ivory, harmonies from
rectangles of wreckage.
Whiskey, coffee, cigarette
voice, a history of performing
for crowds small and medium:
your people.

245/365 Doreen

Three weeks abroad,
Moldova
Ukraine
we listened to liars
doctors, lawyers, professionals:
your Russian came
in handy, and your
calm interpretation of
falsity: you made it work.

Sharing food, scripts, clean
laundry, restrooms in Moscow
airport: bonding over
discomfort and digressions,
shashlik and hiking:
Thanks for your
expertise.

244/365 Mary L

Who advises whom? One question
when age span is less than a
generation. Another question when
one's a newcomer, no matter the
topoi. Your tall, wide,

hands-off manner makes sense but
wasn't especially useful, although
the outcome has been, perhaps,
the same: success in the
eye of the beholder.

243/365 Jenni

Big heart, managing a big
job but you're thriving
with the challenge, pleasures
of being a boss.
Of sorts.
Thinking first of students,
then faculty, finally those
administrators who boss
you: for whom do you work,
exactly,
in this higher-education field?
Soil science never felt this messy,
did it?

242/365 Lisa G

Second person I think of when
reading of SPAM, Austin's delicacy

Our common experience of outsiderness at The
College of: study-abroad, serious students
of literature, you perhaps more:
spine-straight bangs above freckled nose
eyes light green, trimmed with coal-black lashes

Which part of California do you now call home?

241/365 Jane E

Poet who pleases my ex
pleases me because she
appreciates the push and
slide of poems that don't
rhyme, don't fit with a
professional's buttoned-up
downtown meeting, don't
require audience or applause,
just craft and teacher and
serious reader, perhaps time
in another country: gifts
to those we've loved.

240/365 Brock

Bad boy, it's true,
but a lot more:
you see words as things,
ideas as words.

You see trouble, it's true,
make plenty (two
episodes this semester
of blue-black eyes).

But your black-haired
generosity in workshop
helps others take their own
writing seriously: class
outlaw has done so, too.

239/365 Dee

Helper.
Double-helper.

Your sensible-shoes-style
radicalism
radiates through the
writing center,
meeting-and-greeting
a tie-dye bunch of
needy students
who listen to steady
intelligence from
a weedy-haired lady.

Grinning but not
smiling, you nod at
ridiculous questions
from faculty members
who've forgotten
keys
schedules
books
pens
again and again.

Double-helper.
Helper.