This beautiful note came with a huge platter of chocolate-chip cookies, which sustained me over the 1995 Christmas break at Stanford University. I had been teaching in the Writing and Critical Thinking program and mentoring graduate students in the English and Comparative Literature programs in pedagogy. After the Winter/Spring trimester, it would be seven and a half years before I had my own classroom again, at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, in Canada, eh?

My culinary benefactor, Dena, was a fine student in my “Writing and the Bill of Rights” class. She went on to become a teacher herself. I bet she’s fabulous.