Red seats, waiting for March.
Before this visit, I had not set foot in my alma mater for nearly fifty years, apart from a brief after-hours tour with a group of old classmates.
The school has been largely rebuilt since I left in 1976. There is now an indoor swimming pool, an AI lab, and a new auditorium.
I stepped into that auditorium, where I will give a talk next March. Though rebuilt, it kept the layout I remembered: two tiers, with the younger girls in the balcony and the older girls and staff on the main floor. The narrow wooden seats on dark brown steel frames have given way to red upholstered chairs. The stage somehow looked bigger and smaller at the same time. That morning’s assembly slide was still on the screen.
The head of the English department and I went over the format and settled on a 20-minute talk followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. About 1,200 students and staff will attend.
I never imagined that, after half a century away, I would be invited back to speak, about my first book in twenty-three years and my thirty-year career in financial planning. This splendid opportunity would never have happened if I hadn’t said Yes to an improbable spark that traveled 9,000 miles to find me.
