Jim arrives ten minutes late, just as his students are packing up to leave. Instantly Tashi can see that Jim is upset about something; he’s flushed, his mouth is a tight line, he slams his daypack down on his desktop and glares at it. Stands there pulling himself together.

After a while he takes a deep breath, begins the night’s lecture in a monotone. His explanations of comma use, shaky at the best of times, are now almost incoherent. In the middle of them he stops, veers off into one of his historical jags. “So the Irvine Ranch, which began as the county’s only force for conservation, ended up by selling out to a corporation that leased all its land to developers, who made it into a replica of the northern half of the county, ignoring all the lessons they should have learned and grading the hills with a complete disregard for the land. In fact our fine college is part of that heritage. And this development came at the time when the ballistic defense was being put into orbit, so the arms industry expanded into this new land and increased a hold on the county that was already completely dominant!”

Jim’s other students blink at him, completely unimpressed. In fact they’re looking rather mutinous. Most have taken the class to get by the minimal writing test necessary to graduate Trabuco, and they are impatient with Jim’s digressions. Learning to write is hard enough as it is. One of the more aggressive men breaks into Jim’s monologue to complain. “Listen here, Mr. McPherson, I still don’t have the slightest idea when to use ‘that’ or ‘which,’ or which one goes with commas or how to use the commas.” Really disgusted about it, too.

Jim, flustered and still really upset about something, Tash can’t guess what, tries to return to the dropped explanation. He makes a hash of it. The students are looking openly rebellious. Rules of punctuation are not Jim’s forté anyway; he’s more an inspirational teacher than a technical one. But it’s a student body looking for rules and regulations, and they are getting angry at him as he flounders.

“The example you used with me,” Tash says in an ominously silent pause, “is definition versus added information. You use ‘that’ to help define, like in, ‘On the day that it rained.’ And there’s never a comma there. ‘Which’ is for additional information—’Last Friday, which was rainy, turned out well.’ And there you use commas to bracket the interjected phrase.” Several students are nodding, and a relieved Jim is quickly writing examples on the blackboard, screech! Wow, got to watch that chalk, Jimbo. He’s definitely not all there tonight. What’s the problem? “That’s how you put it when I asked you last week,” Tash adds, and begins scribbling the examples in his own notebook.