the deputy dean

Elizabeth spoke so earnestly in her intellectual’s glasses about whatever. She was deputy dean back then and she was trying to woo me. Neither of us knew why. She’d been told to, I guess, and both of us were amazed at that. 

Anyway, she quickly moved on, first to Stanford and then to Cornell and then to the grave. 

And what in the end had been the worth of that magnificent brain? Two decades later, not justice not equality not anything she thought the law could do — or at least not anything she said she thought it could do. 

The only lasting effect of her grand persuasiveness, for me anyway, has been student loans.