I spend a long evening drinking on the couch with James, my old favorite philosophy professor. A decade has elapsed, but he’s basically the same guy: better read than anybody I’ve ever met, fired up to discuss anything and everything, a mixture of funny and hyperintellectual, wearing sandals with socks. During my undergrad years I’d hang around after class, and we would sling thoughts back and forth in the hallway, arguing, speculating, forgetting about time.
At midnight the beer is finished, but neither of us is tired, the energy of reconnecting keeping us up. Somewhere in our rambling — Heidegger, translation, Greece, the ethics of traveling as an American in the twenty-first century — we’ve discovered that James used to spend summers in the Colorado mountain village where I currently reside, three hours away. “I liked the Cocktail Cabin,” he says. “All kinds of fancy martinis. But it was expensive. You got a regular drinking place?”
