By now, my mother’s name, if I’ve kept even the vaguest scholarly track, runs: “Grace Meadows Delman Greer Wrightman Goldblatt Wrightman Koope.” She had married, as I said, two Bucks. One twice. I dislike repeating myself. But some things, no matter how often you say them, you still cannot quite register.

In the tradition of little colleges like ours, the yearbook always dedicates its latest volume. Process of elimination, this one they offered me. The page in question shows a large formal portrait and a smaller “casual”: me on campus wearing my bagged-out cardigan, pausing beneath our founder’s statue, and surrounded by laughing girl students. One has on saddle shoes; and that confused me as to dates. But girls’ particular faces soon came back. And of course, I consulted the picture’s inevitable clock—how much hair I had at the time. Girls’ chuckling over my joke looks wonderfully like wincing. I’d probably offered some play on words of the sort I believe stimulates undergrads into thinking of language as a joyful present-tense game with one long rich history. True, such puns usually yield only slit-eyed groans. But I’ll accept it.

I have always taken teaching seriously. I enjoyed such brilliant early sponsorship myself. I still seem able to feel some absolute identification with my own children and those of others. Few tenured professors prefer teaching Freshmen. The administration loves me for this, bullying colleagues with my example. But I just like the young ones.

Students turn up here away from home for the first time, looking exactly as unmoored as tentatively optimistic. They’re seeking some stray starter compliment, a single corner’s random warmth. I’ve seen whole generations arrive fox-faced and forlorn, carrying their cardboard boxes stuffed with CDs, T-shirts, huge blooming begonias. Kids look nearly as lonely as I remember feeling on the train to school once my father died. Air chafes around them. They worry that a single incoming zit beside their nose will ruin everything. And you know? One decent adult can really help.

I have taught at this college for—what?—twenty-four years now. I may seem to be boasting here and I don’t want to (Clyde would not approve). But maybe you’ll see how my quoting from the annual’s dedication refers far more to Dad than to me.

Since my first great loss, I have been spared so much. For a life that opened with such violence and grief, with certain terrible sights, mine has proved oddly lucky.

The Paradigm citation reads:

We offer this year’s book to Professor C. Meadows Delman. A gent and scholar, he has long been famous for his bad puns but good company. Maybe he is best known for his ever-popular “Bible as Literature” class. We call him “Meadows,” as he told us all to call him from Day One. There are his intellectual insights and several published books. There are his linguistic gifts and communicated love of letters. But past that he has dedicated his life to a calling even larger.