Connections Across Time and Space
Last year I read Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book, A Chance Meeting: American Encounters. As the title suggests, she writes about chance meetings between a variety of American notables. The book has stuck with me over the last year. Some of the encounters she describes are interesting in themselves. But she also has me thinking about how I’ve been shaped by conversations and encounters both random and planned. A recent trip to Texas, where I lived most of the first 30 years or so of my life, brought those formative connections to mind more vividly.
I left Texas almost 40 years ago, and I’m not interested in living there again. I’ve changed, and I think the state has changed as well. My wife and I just spent a week there, visiting family and old friends. I saw the friends and family I expected to see, but there were also a few chance encounters.
We had dinner in Abilene the first night with a long (a long) time family friend. He was in college with my parents in the late 1940s and knew my mother before my father did. I came to know him when I was in college — he taught and chaired the religion and philosophy department at the college where I took my degree. I worked as a student assistant in the department. But the chance encounter here was that his partner joined us for dinner – she’s active in the small Unitarian Universalist church there and my wife directs a UU faith-based human rights organization, so they had a lot to talk about. It was good to re-connect with him and to connect with her.
The next morning we drove to Lubbock to visit my sister. As we were settling in, I checked my email to find a message from a student I taught at Georgetown. The email was one of those gifts former faculty occasionally receive from former students. She thanked me for my class and said that my approach to teaching is one thing that persuaded her to go into college teaching. I saw in her email signature that she’s now in a Ph.D. program at Texas Tech. I was in Lubbock for the first time in years, reading the first email I’d received from that student since she finished my class in 2012, and she’s now studying at a Lubbock university. Coincidental, but still a little freaky.
The next morning we were drinking some very good coffee at Monomyth Coffee and talked a bit with a young couple with child sitting at the table next to us, mostly just exchanging pleasantries. They asked how we found our way from Boston to Lubbock and I said we had family there. I also mentioned that I had gone to college in Abilene. The woman said that her mother had gone to the same school. Based on her appearance, I was guessing that I could be her mother’s age and asked what her mother’s name was. I recognized the name immediately. I didn’t know her well, but I was close friends with some of her close friends. Surely, coincidental. Surely, again, a little freaky.
After the weekend in Lubbock, my wife and I drove to Dallas, where she had work. On Monday I met up with a good friend from graduate school. He now lives in Austin, and we met in Waco at Dichotemy Coffee and Spirits, another very good coffee place. It was great to catch up with him, to bemoan the current state of culture and politics in the country generally and Texas in particular, and even to discuss some philosophical and theological issues. But one thing I learned is that there’s now a PhD student at SMU (where he and I were in grad school together) who is writing a dissertation drawing heavily on the work of our teacher (Schubert Ogden) and one of Ogden’s students. This graduate student graciously agreed on short notice to have lunch with me while I was in Dallas. I really enjoyed the conversations. He was patient with my stories about my classroom and other encounters with Ogden, and I was impressed with the depth and breadth of his understanding of Ogden’s work. What’s more, we learned that one of his good friends had been my wife’s professional colleague, and one of his committee members is a professor whom I hired to teach at a small college in Georgia before I left my position there. More simple coincidences, and also a bit more freakiness.
The day before leaving Dallas, I spent a few hours visiting with another old friend. I worked with her and her husband my first year in graduate school, and both of them were very supportive of me during my time in Dallas. She even played piano at our wedding reception (gratis), and in the past decade or so she’s established a professional relationship with my wife. Her husband died several years ago; it was great to catch up with her and to share memories of my time with them.
All that’s to say that Texas might be a big state, but it’s still in a small world. And it’s a world that shaped the person that I am today.