The email from Michael Kinnick arrived in the afternoon, while I was teaching Postcolonial Perspectives to seniors, and I saw it when I returned to my office before sixth period. Michael would be doing an event in the area the following week, he’d written, and wondered if I’d be free to get a drink. I experienced a few seconds of astonishment—I’d had so little contact with Michael since he’d become famous, and none at all for the last twenty years, that I’d assumed I was no longer a person he knew. That we apparently did still know each other prompted a somewhat embarrassing rush of pride in me, along with curiosity and a mild apprehension.
Any potential musings about the past were, however, cut short by a call from the school nurse: my daughter, Isabel, was complaining of a stomachache. As it happened, the nurse’s office was about a hundred yards from the desk where I presently sat. My wife, children, and I were known as the Green Hills Academy One Car Family because that was how the four of us arrived on campus each morning, before dispersing: Isabel to a first grade classroom; her brother, Drew, to a fourth grade one; Val to the middle school building to teach biology; and I to the upper school to teach English. Green Hills was one of those third-tier K–12 private schools that considered itself second-tier, and its survival was never completely assured from one academic year to the next. It also was the school I had graduated from in 1985, when my father was the headmaster.