my american authors professor is about sixty-five, but he looms and, sitting at my desk, he appears a veritable literary giant, a bearded tree with a bowtie and a cracked smile. he gave me a B on my english midterm, but I still love him. he gestures broadly when he reads aloud, he bursts out laughing at melville’s short-stories (possibly the only person that ever has or ever will), he worships the transcendentalists and dramatically opened a box this week that held in it a nail from thoreau’s cabin. he went to walden pond for his honeymoon and showed us a polaroid to that effect; a faded picture of him and his bride crouching by thoreau’s grave. once, as a grown man, he hid in a graveyard all night to try to spot the unknown personage who lays violets on thoreau’s grave every year on that poet’s birthday. apparently, my professor also is good friends with annie dillard. I let out an audible gasp when he mentioned that offhandedly in class, loud enough that the two people in front of me turned around.

I’ve never read an entire book by an Annie Dillard (I had to return An American Childhood before I was done), but I love what I have read from her. I’d love to write her—wouldn’t she just be the best person to be pen-pals with? Maybe I’ll just give him a letter to give to her, or maybe I’ll give one to Lee Smith when I have coffee with her in a few weeks. I think she’s beautiful.

“All day long I feel created.  I can see the blown dust on the skin on the back of my hand, the tiny trapezoids of chipped clay, moistened and breathed alive. ” —a pilgrim on tinker’s creek