�

"Please wait. I want to talk to you."

I looked up at him, my textbook poised at the mouth of my bookbag. His face was unreadable. I had spent weeks headaching my way through his classes, talking about technology in Prometheus Bound, discussing the myriad tragedies of Oedipus's family, participating in crazy pedophiliac discussions about the meaning of love. He had a way of making grown women cry and making grown men squirm uncomfortably. He gave F's with impunity. What the hell did he want to talk to me about?

He didn't wait for the classroom to empty. Instead, he motioned for me to follow him. We walked down the hall in silence and exited the building, standing in a small second-story courtyard. He put on sunglasses and lit a cigarette. I held my bookbag and squinted.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Why are you here at this university?"

"I suppose because it's close to home and my family." He waved his cigarette and frowned.

"Why didn't you transfer after your first two years, then?" he asked.

"Money," I said. He shook his head.

"You could have found scholarships. You could have found a way." I had nothing to say to that, trying to figure him out like he was a chess game.

"You're wasted here," he said. "You don't belong here. You're not being challenged."

"It's a good school," I tried to interject, knowing that that was exactly true. It was a good school--not a great one, not a particularly academic one. A good school.

I finished his class and received one of the few A's he gave out. As soon as the semester was finished, he moved to New England to teach up there. I doubt I'll ever see him again.

I did not transfer. I graduated from my university and did not attend my graduation ceremony. Most of the time I feel like I am living a good life--then I wonder, but could I be living a great life?

Here is something he had to say in an essay he wrote. "The knowledge 'in memory of' suggested by Socrates thus directs one not to bring back what one knew at some point but to realize the condition for the possibility of knowledge: that one cannot 'have' birds when one has "got control of them" and "has made them captive"; that the bird in hand obscures what the bird is when it is in the wild."