So much happens in a lifetime, but some events have an ability to stay with you, residing just beneath that veil of conscious memory. I don’t often think about those events from so many years ago, but it sometimes takes just a minor stimulus to trigger a flashing recall of those memories.

As an undergraduate, I attended a small liberal arts college. Tuition was a substantial fortune because you received a very personalized education. Instead of class sizes in the hundreds, you most often had a group of less than ten students in each class. As such, developing a close working relationship with professors in the small academic departments was a required part of the small college experience.

Most of my professors were over forty: the men favored tweed jackets and the women stuck to stuffy pantsuits. That all changed in my second semester. Sue was a new hire. She was in her mid-twenties, an extremely talented, new doctoral graduate who yearned to teach in a stimulating environment. As with my other professors, I spent my second semester getting to know Sue, just one of ten students in her small lecture class with an associated laboratory section. She was so much closer to the students in age that it was difficult not to think of her in a slightly different light. Like most of us, she listened to Pearl Jam, thought all politicians were crooks, and always enjoyed a few beers with us at the local pub. The tweed coats and pantsuits preferred Tosca or Vivaldi, respected their politicians, and would daintily sip a Scotch or glass of sherry at the pub.

The next semester, Sue asked me to serve as a laboratory teaching assistant for one of her introductory classes. One doesn’t pay for a liberal arts education and small class size to ultimately have a fellow student teach a laboratory section, so my duties were mainly to help Sue during the laboratory section, grade laboratory reports and help the students, if they needed it. If anything, it was an easy job that helped earn me some extra money.

As that semester drew to a close, I was in the enviable position of having completed all my final exams by the second day of finals week. That left me with almost a week before I flew to my parent’s home for Christmas. After a final, all professors would frantically grade exams. After all, they too wanted to submit those final grades to the registrar and begin their own Winter Break. By Thursday evening of finals week, 95% of the student body had left campus. Strangely, 95% of the faculty had also kicked off their vacation. It was the 5%, mainly the most recently hired who were still learning how to navigate the grading system, who continued to toil for a few more days.

On Friday morning, I ran into Sue at the coffee stand. Like me, she had quite a caffeine addiction. “All