Rebecca’s Reflections
Surprise! My Seventeen-Year-Old Self Wrote Me a Letter!
A number of years ago, I found a letter in my campus mailbox postmarked October 19, 2012. It originated from Raleigh, North Carolina, where I had gone to high school. The return address was from Stephen G. Takacs. The name sounded so familiar but I couldn’t place it...
Surprise! Times have Changed
“Have you found anything surprising?” my friend asks me. I’ve been going through old files as I prepare to vacate my office, closing the door on a long career teaching Japanese literature. “Oh, I don’t know. Just the usual.” My file cabinets are packed full of meeting...
On Rhyming and Taking Risks: A Tribute to Ron Bayes
Ron perched on the edge of the desk. He held a book of poems in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “We’ll work on Japanese forms today,” he said. “The tanka. Show me what you’ve got.” Over the weekend he had assigned Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the...
Traveling on a Pathway of Dreams: Thinking of Beth from Kyoto
“I’m doing the best I can,” Beth texts me. It’s 5:23 in the morning my time. I’m in Kyoto. Beth’s in an intensive care unit in Winston Salem, North Carolina. It’s her third admittance since she began her cancer journey in early 2025. I know she hates being in the...
“The Sun Behind the Eyes”: On Reincarnations, Adaptations, and Living Legacies
Lately I’ve been going through drawers upon drawers of files, deciding what to keep and what to toss. Retirement approaches, and I need to clear out my office. I have more than 35 years to go through covering the work I’ve done at Washington University. Some files and...
The Last Time
There’s a trend these days on social media to acknowledge “the last time” someone does something. Often, it’s something to mark a milestone. For example, the other day I saw a video of a mother telling her pre-adolescent son that she will always remember the first...