Confident of Welcome

Christopher Ricks had been a professor for twice as long as I had been alive when, in the fall of 2003, I first set foot in his classroom as an undergraduate English major. Almost two decades later—long after that semester had wrapped up, long after I’d completed a master’s degree with Christopher as my advisor, long after I had moved away from Massachusetts—he met my daughter Evelyn Josephine when she was a young toddler. In fact, Christopher met Evelyn more than once on Zoom. One time, he even sang to her; we both did actually, a duet of the first verse of the Marseillaise, for reasons I can no longer remember.