The Journeys We Can Still Take Safely
When I was a boy, I used to love to visit my mother’s workplace.
As a teenager and a man in my twenties, that love changed into wariness. Now, as a forty something son to a retired mother, I find myself thinking back fondly of the place where she spent thirty plus years of her life.
As the youngest child of the newest member of the faculty of the Botany department of an all-women’s college, I was the star of every visit to her classroom.
Her colleagues thought me the funniest and smartest boy they knew but that was only to be expected because I was the first boy child born in the department after a sequence of four girls.
We would order food from the cafeteria — usually samosas — those hot, deep-fried triangles filled with potatoes and future high-blood pressure. Her students usually ignored me while I roamed the back of the class where leaf, shoot, and root samples sat in some sort of yellow solution in big glass mason jars with thick lids topped with glass knobs.
I got to write on the greenboard between classes only to have to quickly erase it as students filed in for the next lecture. In a tropical country…
