After several days of beautiful, warm weather, at 12:15 this morning, a cold front came through--temperatures started dropping (and will continue to drop throughout the day) and a hard, cold rain began to fall.  Sometimes, Topeka has beautiful, long autumns.  Not this year.  The combination of a very hot, very dry summer, an early hard freeze, and many windy days meant that the autumn leaves fell abruptly.  We have a large, old cottonwood tree in the backyard.  A year or so ago, it was struck in the night by lightning.  We heard a loud, cracking sound, and sparks began to fall from the branches.  It was a frightening time: did we need to call the fire department or would the rain put out any fires?  After a few minutes of hesitation, I went back to bed, telling Mohamed to keep an eye on it.  (What a thoughtful husband I am!)  The fire never spread, but the tree was badly damaged, and perhaps 30% of it had to be cut away.  Still, the tree survives.  Every year, it loses most of its leaves early in the fall.  But a few always hang on until after the rest of the trees in the yard have lost their foliage.  And every year, when I look at those few leaves, I think of Shakespeare's sonnet 73, which begins "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang..."  Last year, when those lines went through my head, I was pretty sure that it would be the last time I needed them.  Luckily, I was wrong.

I always recalled too the time when two final candidates for a vacant Shakespeare position came to campus for an interview and a presentation.  Both interviewed well.  The first candidate's presentation involved deconstructing a rather obscure history play, one of those plays that probably none of us had read.  Even in a graduate class or seminar in Shakespeare, it was an unlikely choice.  In 1977, I had been a post-doc Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory, then held at U Cal-Irvine.  This was near the beginning of the theoretical revolution that brought an end to the close reading of the New Criticism, as it had always been called, and brought Deconstruction, Reader Response, and the New Historicism to the center of academic lit. crit.   Our teachers were among the biggest names in the new direction: Edward Said, Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith.  For a small-town guy from Iowa who had gone to grad school at a university much more known for its football team than for its English department, this was a heady summer.  Everyone was in awe of the handsome and exotic Edward Said.  Stanley Fish was the friendliest, often coming at night to the co-ed dorm where the Fellows lived.  (Since he later married one of us, Jane Tompkins, who became famous herself as a critic, perhaps his motives were not as social as we thought.)   I'm not sure many of us actually understood what we were hearing, but that didn't seem to matter.  And it didn't hurt that almost every afternoon, we took a break to lounge on the sand at nearby Newport Beach.

I did my final paper for Murray Krieger, an old-school New Critic who was, I thought, often treated rather badly by the new guard.  No one has ever said that academics were above petty frays.  Adlai Stevenson once said that powerlessness corrupts, and absolute powerlessness...  I wrote my major paper for Krieger on ekphrasis in Light in August and was temporarily proud of it.  But the last day we were there, I was browsing in the university bookstore and came across a collection of essays by Krieger, which included one on ekphrasis in Light in August.  Mine was a pale imitation of Krieger's, and I was panicked.  I rushed to his office to try to explain, though no explanation could account for how I had ignored my own professor's scholarship on this narrow topic.  Krieger was the kindest and gentlest of men, and he was extremely gracious in understanding and assuring me that he took my coming to the same conclusions as a form of flattery.  I left his office and the summer Fellowship feeling only slightly reassured--and much more strongly embarrassed.

But to get back to my point (and I do have one, as Ellen used to say), I was duly (and snobbishly) impressed by the first candidate's presentation.  The second candidate, Maureen (Mo), was much smarter.  She did a traditional explication of sonnet 73.  All of us knew the sonnet, and she passed out copies of it to revive our familiarity.  All of us understood and practiced close reading.  It was amazing how quickly we fell into the role of students.  We all puzzled over phrases; we all asked questions.  I still remember mine: wouldn't it, I asked, have been more logical to reverse the order of 'none' and 'few' in the second line?   I thought to myself that the presentation was a great success and an example of how good teaching worked.  I also thought that it was too easy, and so I voted for the first candidate.

Fortunately, I was in a small minority, as Mo was hired and became one of our most effective and popular teachers, to say nothing of a wonderful colleague and friend.  After three years on phased retirement, she retires completely at the end of this year.  I told her once of how I voted, and, like Krieger, she said she understood completely.  I never brought it up again, though.  There was no sense in pushing my luck.