today has been surreal. first a trip to swarthmore with liz and lana. lunch at the overpriced but cute cheese court to which i’d never previously been; once i listened really hard, i could almost hear its fabled past occupants enjoying excitement through the ceiling. unpacked the flat, liz finally breaking in my beanbag chair by throwing it downstairs, catching visitors offguard: kim, back from china; anna, of the intimidatinglycoolfolk; and mariah, who i never got to say goodbye to at the end of last semester. everyone chorused, “i thought you were gone.”
hopping through parrish, i encountered others, including a serene jackie and our friend Bob the Dean, who had the same reaction. missed the girls upstairs in my favorite room. said my last goodbyes, at least for a while.
checked out ‘ford for lana, who’s applying to transfer there. all agreed it’s lovely. then faced a decision: stay and wait for the ‘friend to return, or, knowing how intense rush hour traffic could be, head back for the mothertongue reading at 8:30? eventually, because we’d promised lana we’d make it, we headed out, though i clutched my cellphone forlornly, willing it to ring, until delaware.
the reading, atypically, was devoted to the memory of one of its organizers, heather davis, who died at the end of december. her entire community was devastated. for hour after hour, we watched as dykes, allies, and one brave male ascended the stage to read tributes to her, many of them moving, most of them funny. awesome, in that biblical sense of the word: we got a great idea of who this woman we’d never known was and what she meant to these folks; also just what community is.
capped off the long day by unloading at my house and lingering briefly in my kitchen where my father was translating a page of yiddish for my mother for her co-worker. the page was a xerox from a book the coworker had found in her house but couldn’t understand. as it turned out, it described the coworker’s grandmother’s town in russia. apparently they grew potatoes there.
like i said, surreal.