Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

This is the last of a three part series. As I write this, the last day of 2007, I just reread a short story my former co-teacher Galatea forced on me once some 15 years ago, "Old Love" by Jeffrey Archer, having bought my own copy of the book by the master short story writer - but not because of the memory it represented.

In fact, finishing it now, I finally understand why she let me read it, although I don't recall any of those elements at the time. All I recall before this was it was about two very smart scholars, a boy and a girl, who entered the same essay contest to see who was better. For the first time in the history of the prestigious contest, they both were awarded first prize. He proposed to her after that, and she accepted. Some thirty years later she died of a heart attack, and he died before that same day was out.

Now I realize that the main characters' relationship, even as husband and wife, was full of verbal jousting, usually at the expense of the other's implied inadequacy. And that when the woman died, the man killed himself with a gun rather than leave unresolved their final argument about the existence of a certain answer in their last contested crossword puzzle - to correct her in the afterlife, it seemed.

Even before this I admitted to myself that there was a time when I liked her, when it bothered me enough to not be able to push through with a lecture, but now I realized even back then I didn't know it myself, which was why I couldn't say it to her, and that was probably what she was waiting for.

I also thought she was hiding her own feelings from both of us behind a curtain of my perceived negative traits, but now from the short story I believe she thought she was in the middle of a "Taming off the Shrew" scenario of romantic wit-slinging.

Except that was all in her mind. Being just recently graduated, I was full of my own achievement and sensitive to being treated like a school boy again.

Besides, at the time, my idea of one-up-man-ship was setting the alarm clock she brought along in her bag to and from mountain climbing trips to go off sometime after we parted, like on the bus or when she's resting at home.

Will I try to make reparations if I see her again, or better yet make attempts to contact her armed with this new-found knowledge of what actually happened unsaid all those years ago? No. I believe she might be worse now having no one like me to stand up to her concerning her own faults.

Session 1963 feels more mature now, in some aspects, not all. Class dismissed.