On a brilliant November day, my students talked me into teaching outside. So we were at an outdoor amphitheater on the Danube when I broke into the story of the professor on my Christmas card list. In college, I spent summers in a small town in Colorado working as a waitress at a sportsbar and restaurant. Waiting tables is good penance and a particular sort of training to endure life’s haters.

A couple came in one day and we chitchatted while the wife mulled the beer list. The man asked what I was studying, what I wanted to do. He caught me in a hopeful spirit. I’d just taken a literature course that renewed my faith in reading, in something I’d loved since childhood. I said I might like to be an English professor one day. His wife gazed away and the man scoffed. He was himself an English professor…