A Fading Professor On a February Friday

A FADING PROFESSOR ON A FEBRUARY FRIDAY On a cold, gray day that made cold and gray synonymous with abyss, she came to his office with two new drawings that advanced her thesis about ecological design in a coastal Canadian city She had done something to her hair, something else to her nails, nothing at all to her eyes that were almond, Sephardic, Israeli, in a way that gave new meaning to deep brown and soft It was four twenty-five on a February Friday, eight degrees outside, the lake-effect snow horizontal in the wind, the big building next door an uncertain arrangement of blurry white lights in the dark afternoon; and the requirements of winter, the so-called spring semester, were wearing him down like the arcane rituals and the strict prohibitions of an ancient religion that could no longer offer any comfort or solace in our savagely modern and turbulent times! With a professorial manner that just barely camouflaged a nearly naked ambivalence he invited her to sit and to roll out her drawings, discuss her ideas, while he silently and subtly escaped to the weekend for rest and repair of an overextended and overworked soul Responding with energy and apparent aplomb to each point she made, he was actually gone – like the sharp after-image of a sudden bright light, he was seemingly real but gone just the same, off to a place where the snowfall had stopped and the susurrating cadence of the single frame drum and a singing prayer bowl summoned him for dinner, for deep meditation, and an agnostic’s prayer addressing gratitude and grace beneath a stained glass sky fading slowly into night