She was given to fits of semi-precious metaphors

I had several professors at Brandeis who changed my life: Lenny Muellner, Cheryl Walker, Andrew Swensen, all amazing. But Luis Yglesias might have been the person who changed my life in the most fundamental way: he taught me that I was a storyteller. I was taking a class with him in the spring of 2000, second half of my freshman year; I'd gotten to know him in the fall, when Professor Walker recommended me to him: "He knows more mythology than God." And one day, in mid-March, he asked me if I'd like to tell a story from santería—the fusion of Catholicism and Yoruba myth that we were studying along with other facets of the Caribbean; a religion that Luis had grown up knowing—and because what I knew of the stories did fascinate me, I agreed. I didn't have the first clue what I was doing. I didn't think I had the first clue. He lent me a book with the most godawful purple prose you could imagine—I remember asking him if I had to tell the stories using the author's language, and in horror he told me no, definitely not, use your own voice—and I picked a few stories about the triangle of Oshun, Shangó, Oggún; a few about Elegguá, the trickster, too; and I'd run them over in my head at night, sometimes before the mirror in my dorm room. I'd never formally told a story to an audience before. I sang; I knew how it felt to have that silence in a room, that attention focused entirely on you. But I'd never done it with spoken words. I'd always thought I was only good with songs and printed words: other people's tellings and stories that I wrote. And I learned, that afternoon, when I told about the love affair of Oshun, the sweetwater queen, whose two faces are the flirtatious sexpot and the Virgin Mary, and Shangó, who is lightning and thunder and drums, the loverboy whose other face is Saint Barbara, that I could tell stories. And I loved it. It's now one of the skills I count among my regular repertoire—classics, writing, singing, storytelling—and I don't know if I ever would have discovered this, if it hadn't been for Luis.

So on Sunday was Luis' seventieth birthday party at Lily's On The Pond, the fantastic restaurant up in Jaffrey, NH that his wife Suanne co-owns, and you can bet I was there. Along with people I'd never before and people I hadn't seen in years: other professors, former students, old friends and family, and it was lovely. I had to get up at six in the morning to catch a bus from New Haven up to Brattleboro, VT where Peter Gould lives—Luis calls us his bookends, because Peter was there in his first year of teaching at Brandeis and I was there in his last; and we perform together, so we had to work out something for Luis' party that night—and then at seven in the morning on Monday to make it back to New Haven in time for the lecture that devoured my life all last week, and it all worked out. Even with the sleep deprivation. Even with the snowstorm. I need more weekends like this in my life.

Below are notes about the day that I wrote down for myself and another person, Sunday night at Peter's house. Cut for extended reminiscent description. For stream-of-consciousness, I rather like.

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And of course, coming back, there was a blizzard. What was fine, dry, flour-sifted snow in Vermont had turned into sodden, heavy, clotted-windshield snow by western Massachusetts, so that I made my train in Springfield by ten minutes and it took an extra half-hour to reach New Haven. (Of course, there was no snow in New Haven. There was only miserable warm rain and then humidity. What's wrong with this city? Is a little winter too much to ask?) I arrived on campus with forty-five minutes left before I had to deliver my lecture, which of course I'd been revising on the train-and it went fine. I improvised about a third more than I'd expected, but never too far away from the written paper; and since I had five minutes left over afterward, I told my class the story of Sedna. They seemed to like it. I was very pleased.

In other people's news, greyselke's dig has made CNN. This is seriously cool. time_shark's "The Journey to Kailash" will ensure that you never complain about your own in-laws again. And this is both mine and others' delight: Matthew Cheney's 2005: Some of the Goods includes truepenny's Mélusine, Holly Phillips' In the Palace of Repose, SFPA's The Alchemy of Stars: The Rhysling Award Winners Showcase (yay, time_shark!), and my own Postcards from the Province of Hyphens. All is coolness.