Here’s a memory that circles back every July 10th.

In college we had a wonderfully cheerful assistant professor of Russian language. Russian was a terrible source of stress for some students, and a real struggle for us all. But the classroom was always warmed by Prof and his boundless boyish energy and wholesome outbursts of enthusiasm. Only one time did he ever react to us with disappointment, when somehow we all showed up in class without proper preparation for the day’s readings; then he picked up his briefcase in sorrow and perplexity and walked out on us, leaving an amazed repentant class. The other faculty stepped in to explain his reaction that day: all year our Prof had been teaching our classes by day, but spending his nights in the hospital caring for his beautiful warm-hearted wife. After her funeral, where all of us were invited, our teacher devoted all his free time to his PhD. Many a night we left our evening classes and could see his light on and hear his manual typewriter hammering through stacks of index cards. Sometimes we students brought him snacks, and he would step out in the hall full of appreciation that we had remembered him.

This young graduate student in the throes of doctorate-deadline-for-tenure and publish-or-perish still delivered just the right gentle nudge of encouragement to the course of my life. I was a despondent 19 year old who decided to drop out of my Russian Language major. I stopped by his office hours so that he as my advisor could sign my Drop Course cards for the Registrar. But he categorically refused. Instead he gave me a pep talk and somehow extracted a promise that I be back in his class on Monday.

What changed my mind and career was not only the words that he said to me. It was the manual typewriter, the index cards, the library books; clear signs that he was not only exhorting me not to give up, but was setting an example himself. More than that, it was the portrait frame over his desk. There was a picture of his wife, laughing and radiant in a lovely dress and hat. Under her picture there was a little poem. It took years for me to find that poem again; it used to be attributed to “Anonymous,” but nowadays it’s credited to Mary Lee Hall:

If I should die and leave you here a while,
Be not like others sore undone,
Who keep long vigil by the silent dust.
For my sake turn again to life and smile,
Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
Something to comfort other hearts than thine.
Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine
And I perchance may therein comfort you.

Facing that picture and those verses, my despondency and Course Drop cards just didn’t seem so important. I went back to Russian classes and stayed there.

Then, Prof got a good summer teaching job in another state with a completely different landscape. At our end of year student party I was working the refreshment table, and with a shy smile he confided that he looked forward to the change of scene: “It looks like the countryside from our honeymoon.” He went, he taught, and on July 10th in that pretty scenery he was killed in an accident. This day every year his memory is right here, his kindly nature and gee-whiz cheer. The accident was 49 years ago today. He was 30.

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Yesterday in the late summer dusk on a sidewalk lined with pretty shrubs, half a block ahead there’s a man walking a small poodle. Suddenly the dog owner shouts “No! No! Stop it! What’s gotten into you?” The dog is silent, leaping and yanking the leash, clawing at the ground, trying to run away. I can’t see what the dog’s problem might be, but my reflex is to cross to the other side of the street. That brings me parallel to the two of them. As we continue in the same direction, a raccoon strolls out of the greenery and heads in the opposite direction — just where I was half a minute ago. He’s about four times the size of the dog, and sashays on up the street as if he owns it.

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It’s a hot day. An alert mom in full hijab and floor-length black dress deftly wheels her child’s stroller on to the bus and hooks it in securely. She sits down, searching intently for something on her phone, sending a few texts, watching for a reply, scanning the streets and stops, pulling out and poring through some official looking paperwork. Meanwhile her nicely dressed active kiddo is looking all over, talking to himself, playing with his toes. He’s burbling out syllables and waving at Mom for attention while Mom plans what they need to do and where they need to go. Finally he belts out a series of ear-ringing shrieks. To save everyone’s hearing, I get up and move to the seat opposite him. Then he starts singing, of all things, the refrain of Old McDonald’s Farm. So I join right in. At “E-I-E-I-O” he sits bolt upright. Who gave HER the spy decoder ring? He’s floored to hear his own song coming back at him. Just then Mom puts away the paperwork and phone, leaps up, and rings the stop bell. Kiddo and I launch into a standby parlor trick: waving and hollering “Bye Bye!” back and forth while Mom unhooks the stroller. He and I go on hollering and waving while she wheels out, flashing me a beautiful smile.

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A group of teenagers and a couple of adult companions are all over the bus, making a happy ruckus. I’m in the first seat reading my Bible when one of them pipes up in a low roaring voice “I am a JEALOUS God — Bitch!” Maybe they’re just making fun of the book in my hand up here? It sounds as if one of the boys is booming out random hellfire judgments, a mix of Bible verses and profanity, to be a clown for his friends. I finish a Psalm and turn the page, and it dawns on me that the teenagers have just left the bus, but there are still outbursts from that furnace voice. Very discreetly I take a look back. The bus is empty. There is one passenger, a very fit trim man in his 30s or so with eyes on fire with rage. He’s been talking to me. Not only is he quoting God with various expletives, he is channeling God, making vast assumptions as to my intimate proclivities and my place on the gender identity spectrum, and informing me in graphic terms what he plans to do about it. My arm yanks the bell pull, my feet arrow toward the front, and the driver gives me a sympathetic look. This next stop is empty, a little afterthought between the back of a parking garage and a wetland. How to let me out without letting out the passenger? The driver pulls off a swift maneuver to the curb, and as I leap out he careens away into the traffic while slamming the door. It’s a lucky day.

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That same little wetland was a scene for a happier event, last week’s nature walk with two genuine biologists. It’s wonderful walking beside two people trained for different specialties. One can hear snakes in the underbrush by their characteristic means of locomotion; at one point he swoops in and Presto! shares a garter snake with our eager hands. He can hear the special splash of startled frogs, and easily points them out to us as they linger under the water surface. Our other companion can find whole meanings in fine camouflaged lines; at one point she patiently talks me through the points in branch after branch, so that like them I will be able to see an entire family of raccoons not 30 feet away, all staring at us from a tree. (No soap. To me it’s just foliage.) They both hear and then see a nesting pair of bald eagles. I hear and then see a blue heron curled up nesting not ten feet off the path in some reeds. I also stop at a lush thicket of Queen Anne’s Lace, and pulling out my phone show them some of my photos of Poison Hemlock and all the ways that the two plants are different. I’m not used to companions who respond with celebration at the things that I perceive and point out. “Oh look, a messy spider web; not an orb pattern at all,” I tell them with some excitement. To me that means a hunting spider. Maybe we’ll see him come out and hunt something? Well, they both know that factoid better than I do. But they have a good laugh about it. “‘Messy’ web? Ooh, so harsh. It’s a whole new brutal side of Mary!” It was such a good time. Like grownups having the best kind of play day.

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Eye clinic. For the various tests and chart readings and dilation and scans and consultation, they have to move my room several times. The clinic manager has a wonderful personality, succinct speech and rapid-fire multitasking. She catches on right away that I have an appreciative attitude and a sense of humor. After pronouncing my eye pressure “Gohgeous!” she exhorts me to use artificial tears more often than I have been, and forking two fingers she points them to her eyes, then to mine: I’ll be watching you. She ushers me to the next room with an apology for the moving and waiting. I assure her that she is the one working, while I am just a tourist here to nap in their air conditioning. At the last room change I offer to wait in the parking garage if need be. “Don’t do that. The garage has…” Cars? I suggest. She gives me my quote for the day. “Crematorium. You think I’m kidding? Not.”

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Outside our building near the barbecue pit, a young man with his back to me is acting out a vehement rap song. He’s a slender slight-built White guy being one tough gangster rapper, mimicking the gestures and tones, really going full gear Look out, here I come don’t mess with me. His barbecue companion is a visitor, a calm earnest Black man 30 years old or so getting a chuckle out of this performance until he sees me coming. Then his eyes go wide. It’s a graphic song; what is this older lady going to do? Catching his eye with a sympathetic smile I clasp my hands over my heart, batting my lashes at our rapper, gazing like a starry eyed fangirl. Ooh, the raw talent! And with that, our guest is all smiles; he gets that I’m exactly on board with our dramatic performer.

Our tough son of a gun rapper is Greggo, a mild-mannered friendly soul who loves pranks. For example, Greggo once invited old friends from high school. When the friends arrived with a cooler of their microbrew beer of choice, Greggo fired up the barbecue and cranked the music way up. A wild death metal song came on with screeching lyrics stating that Gypsum High School Coneybear football were a bunch of wusses who lost the best season of their lives 3-0 at the last goal, and that only a dumb Coneybear would drink Woonsockett beer. That song nearly sent the Woonsockett beer right out the ears of his proud Coneybear pals. It turns out that Greggo fed those lyrics and death metal specs into an AI system, and wrote songs about every friend at the barbecue. If this were a war film, Greggo would be the annoying indispensable clown on the lifeboat keeping the crew morale alive with his antic frat jokes.

Greggo turns around and sees me, and we all have a good laugh. I sit down to visit with them for a bit, and somehow the conversation turns to parenting. Both men share a poignant concern: they’ve done all they can, to buy good things for their children to give them a good educational start — phones, computers. But now the children are bonding to the screens instead of coming to their parents for entertainment. Why, on this beautiful Sunday, the children are right in Griggo’s house here, looking at video games. So we sit together and ponder that parenting today seems to be a whole new level of complexity. It’s a touching moment, to listen and marvel at how much they care about their children, and how determined they are that these kids will have a better life.

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Grocery store. Cashier Elson has a nature surprise to show me. Right below his apartment window, on the flat roof, two seagulls laid eggs in some leaf litter. The chicks have hatched. They’re beautiful chicks, perfectly camouflaged for leaf litter. Now we customers have a ringside phone view of daily updates from Elson’s mini bird sanctuary.

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On the bus again, a mom is teaching her little girl how to ring the stop bell. Daughter grips the rope with both hands, bouncing on her toes with eagerness at the chance. She is so little that Mom cradles her kiddo up straight with one arm, and with her other arm she discreetly reaches behind her daughter to do the actual bell pulling. DING! I sit up straight, crying out “Whoa, did YOU ring that? Nice job on that bell.” The little girl is amazed. She makes the connection: my action gets applause! I’m a star! Now she’s looking around for something else to pull. Seeing the chin strap, she gives it a tug and then turns to me for my reaction. “Wow, nice job on that chin strap!” I call out. The other passengers are ladies in little sunhats, wheeling packed shopping carts and speaking Cantonese. But as the mom and her little one make their way forward up the aisle, the Chinese ladies stop their chat and start clapping. Applause, everywhere! Mom gives me a grin. “Bye Bye!” I yell after them.