When Laurie posted the image on Facebook, I was caught completely by surprise. My eyes filled with tears and I stopped breathing. I had no pictures. My mother had saved a few, but by the time my brother and I cleaned the house after mom passed, the pictures were gone. Mom loved Celeste, too.
A writer. A thinker. Compassionate, soulful and deep. Her eyes look at me now accusing – and I don’t have the words to respond. She teaches Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to spellbound students at Berkeley. I just survived. She deserves more now. She deserved more then.
Celeste. She was an undergrad at Penn, getting her bachelors and masters concurrently, destined for doctoral work through a fellowship at Yale. On a whim, she took a part time job at a pizza shop just off campus, within sight of the highrise dorms. I was running the ovens in the shop and closing up at night. She was different than any of the other students we’d hired; different than anyone I’d known. Tall, lean, agile, she was quick to laugh, quicker with a comeback and brilliantly engaging in even the most casual conversation. Through her influence I read Mysteries of Udolpho and Melmouth the Wanderer. I developed a fondness for Blake and Coleridge, and an immature awareness of Spencer and Milton. I was engaged by the criticism of Harold Bloom, and the place held by Marx, Nietsche, and the Transcendentalists in literary criticism. I appreciated the simple and anticipated the profound. Celeste.