In the spring of 2001, I was going to a meeting at the place where I worked then and still work now. Another of the people at the meeting was an academic dean of our school. She was perhaps the purest expression of academia *at* that school.

1/

That day she was literally wearing a tweed blazer. Before she'd become a dean she'd been an English teacher. Now, the epitome of English Teachers, in my brain, was and remains my father. That day she was a close second.

2/

That day I said hello and asked how she was or somesuch.

She gave me a slightly wry smile. "Oh, you know. Measuring my life in coffee spoons," she said. I chuckled, and we may have traded a couple more lines of 'Prufrock.' I'm not sure.

3/

And I've always been a fan of T.S. Eliot, so it felt natural enough to come to and fro, talking of Michelangelo, and otherwise it seemed a clever turn of phrase just before a meeting about school management systems and database development.

4/

It is a couple of days before 2021, and I am 20 years older, and that memory has taken on a very different shade and tenor. We have all seen too much since then, over and over again.

5/