2.  I survived the AIDS epidemic, while so many of the people I cared about did not.  Nearly thirty years ago, my undergraduate roommate--funny, smart, good-looking, young--was the first I knew who died.  Rich had gone to San Francisco to join, he thought, the American Conservatory Theater.  But they ultimately didn't take him, and to survive he became a male prostitute.  I visited him once there in perhaps the most depressing trip I ever took.  Rich lived in a fleabag hotel in the Tenderloin.  The rooms had single, shadeless bulbs hanging from the ceiling.  There was one toilet in the hallway on each floor.  I peed in the sink in my room at night because I was afraid to go into the corridor.  Rich and I barely saw each other, since he plied his trade at night and slept during the day.  I never saw him again.  And there was Ken, whom I took to Paris for the last summer of his life.  And Jacques, who ran a Nicolas wine shop in Paris.  How many afternoons I spent there--tasting wine and even selling a few bottles.  We could always tell Americans when they entered, not only from their tennis shoes and shorts, but also from their nervous air of intimidation.  "Can I help you," I'd ask in English, and we'd watch their attitude change in gratitude.  When I came back to Paris one time, Jacques' partner said that he would be so happy to see me, that he'd been, for some reason, depressed.  When Jacques and I met for dinner A la biche aux bois, one of my favorite restaurants in Paris, I knew instantly from his gaunt appearance what was wrong.  And the beautiful Gustavo--one year a gorgeous model in Paris, the next wasting away in his hospital bed.  And too many more.

It wasn't just AIDS, but other early deaths.  If you spend 39 years in one institution as I have at Washburn, you see a lot of deaths, all too many of them of friends and colleagues and spouses who died before "their time."  And not all the deaths were natural; I seem to have known more suicides than is probable--from one of my eighth grade teachers through students and colleagues till last summer, the summer of what QE2 would call another "annus horribilis," when two friends committed suicide: one a friend of forty years, female, American, rich, once very beautiful, a long, slow, but inexorable self-destruction fueled by bottles and cases and years of what she always called the bubbly; the other a friend of 20 years, male, French, once cute, also a slow self-destruction, this one capped by one definitive act. 

When I taught American literature, we often read a story by Theodore Dreiser called "Free."  It worked well as a counterpoint to Kate Chopin's "The Story of An Hour."  In both, the main character is married to someone he or she does not love, and when that person dies (or is reported to have died), the main character feels momentarily free.  Unlike Chopin's story, Dreiser's is long and overly explicit about the main character's motives.  He's a good man and a faithful and caring husband, but he doesn't love his wife (and Dreiser is none-too-subtle about her less than lovable characteristics).  When she dies, he feels guilty, but, for a moment, free.  And then he realizes that he is fifty and that fifty is old.  He may be free at last, but his life his behind him.  The students regularly had two reactions: they sympathized with Chopin's female protagonist, but not with Dreiser's male.  And they were totally baffled by his feeling of being old at fifty.  No matter that I explained that at the time the story was written, the average life expectancy for American men was fifty, the students couldn't seem to grasp that fifty was once (and only 100 years ago) considered the end of life.  And so I survived actuarial tables, even if they were from other eras. 

But it's about more than just survival.  I know that I've been very lucky in my life.  For 45 years, I taught literature and language--a career that I loved.  Randall Jarrell once said that if he wasn't paid by others to teach, he'd pay to do so.  I felt that way too, though in the current climate I didn't say that aloud till the last year, since the administration might well have taken me at my word.  How lucky to get paid to talk about things that you love!  And lucky too in that, purely by serendipity, the Menninger letters were here, and I got to work with a man who was still brilliant (if very cantankerous) in his nineties and finally to produce four books and a monograph, as well as articles on literary subjects more closely related to my own field.  I was lucky in that two sisters, whom I never knew, endowed a summer sabbatical fund that enabled me to spend seven or eight summers in Paris.  It seems that every fourth year I got restless and took a semester or, more often, a year off--regular sabbaticals alternating with leaves of absence to teach abroad--first in Macedonia, then France, then Bulgaria, and finally Morocco.  Those four years were some of the happiest and most interesting of my life.  I learned how much I loved languages and how language opens the way to immersion in the culture.  In the three countries that were poor, there were certainly challenges, especially in the educational system, but the students were eager and often determined.  And I've been very lucky in that for the last five years, I've loved and been loved despite what began as a very long-distance relationship.

I want(ed) to live longer, of course.  (The past tense seems depressingly fatalistic; the present tense perhaps naively optimistic.)   I wanted many more years on a new page in my life.  But even if that's not to be, I do know that I've had a happy and lucky life. 

So how am I doing?  I can't complain.