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86 a tall pat of butter in the middle of a bare bowl. Then the soup was poured over it. This defiantly lavish use of butter—I know it’s defiant because we all know about animal fats and cholesterol and good fats and bad fats—is a reaction to the self-satisfied substitution of olive oil. Back to butter. Retro-smug. Retro-rebellious. My subsidized dinner was with Smart U Day School folks and a lovely, lyrical visiting writer. I am with the Night School. The difference between Day and Night is the difference between . . . night and day. You saw that one coming. The Day School people, mostly, have full-time contracts. The Night School people are all part-time. As I told a prospective student yesterday who wanted to meet me during office hours, I don’t have an office. I wrote this to him on e-mail. He wrote back: That sure cuts down on office hours. Though this isn’t to say that the Day School people never teach at night. They do. Then they are Day people moonlighting. The Day people can be tenured. The Night people are always hanging. Tenured, from the verb to hold. We are slippery, we Night people. We slither, frictionless, through the groves of academe. We can break bread with the Day people, we can partake of their largesse, and then we slink our way to another institution and then back, as if we know where we’re going. MAY 21. THE EROTIC LIFE OF PROPERTY I went to a funeral today, my third in the past year. In Jewish law, one of the best things you can do for someone is help with the burial, because that person can never repay you. I knew that that’s why the assembled people lined up to put earth on the grave, for that very reason. I didn’t know that you were supposed to stick the shovel back in the pile of dirt and not hand it to the next person. The reason, the rabbi told us, is because we are supposed to be reluctant in this task, reluctant to bury this person who was just among us. I didn’t know the person who died. I knew his son Cory (my student) and daughter-inlaw , and had met his ex-wife. When I’d told Cory that I had cancer, he 87 said something like it feeling like I was family. He’d been in two of my classes and I’d supervised his internship. His family had sent me flowers , so going to the funeral seemed to be the thing to do, to continue this circle of participating in important events in each other’s lives. For many years I did not understand why my parents’ friends— people I didn’t know—had sent me presents on my bat mitzvah. I figured it out when I read The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde. He talks about how gifts define community. Then I was able to see that the bat mitzvah gift was more than one gift, it was a gesture in a (then-)35-year chain of gestures and connections. I still have a letter that one of my father’s friends wrote me on my bat mitzvah . It was about the friendship of the families. That man recently died and my mother went to the funeral and then to the shiva. Here, I have the letter, in my Nonfiction files, under the man’s last name. He wrote: YourfatherandIwenttoschooltogetherandhaveremainedclosefriendsoverthe years. Unfortunately we (you and I) have not gotten to know each other as well as I would have liked. It is not unusual in this busy fast moving world of ours for good friends to see little of one another in comparison to the time spent together as children and young adults. As each takes on additional responsibilities, less time is available for “get togethers.” You willdiscoverthiswhenyougetolder.Thenyouwillrealizethatagreatmanyofyourfriends remain close to you even though you do not see them as often as you would like. He wrote to me as an equal. He thanked me for including his family in the bat mitzvah and after-party. I had nothing to do with his invitation. My parents invited their friends and our relatives, and I invited my friends. The thing is, despite all the proclaimed warmth of his letter, his family didn’t invite my...

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