Positivity.

Late, as nearly always, I step into my English 501 seminar for the first day. There are only two seats left surrounding the collection of folding tables bunched together, surrounded by office chairs in the Knights of the Round Table kind of setting the grad courses all use.

I take the one directly to the left of where Dr. Walker is going to sit. While this once would have been intimidating, I’ve been rather relaxed of late. There’s the added bonus that this is my third class with the guy, and the fact that I, half the faculty, and most of the English grads got roaring drunk with him on Friday night at the “welcome, new grads” party he holds annually at his house.

Two seats to the left of me is Jessica, the gorgeous new feminist theory student who I saw at the party, perpetually surrounded by nine guys hitting on her at once. Homey don’t play that, so I stayed out of the feeding frenzy. If there is meant to be a time, I think, there will be a time. I just look over at her and offer a smile.

We move class over to the library, where we’re to be instructed on how to use the electronic informational sources. I make pleasant small talk with Jess on the way over. I already know all of this library stuff, of course, because I had to do all of it last Spring, when I started here, with no instructional course at all. I learned by screwing things up and cursing until I figured matters out for myself, a hard but effective method of learning.

I begin to zone out from boredom, thinking instead about this delightful young woman next to me. She’s from a tiny little college, and is a little intimidated by the bigness of this place, the huge library and sprawling campus. Perspective is a funny thing, because coming from a 50,000 undergrad population like Ohio State to here, I was taken aback by how quaint and personal everything seemed. Objects on the ground look small, hanging from the Buckeye tree.

As the lecture winds down, a tiny kindness pops into my head. “Would you like a tour of the library,” I ask Jess, wishing someone had done that for me.

“Sure,” she says, with a look of pleasant surprise. Most people, I am beginning to conclude, don’t say things like this. I didn’t until rather recently.

So we tour the huge two floors of William Randall Library, going through the alphabetized journals she’ll need to use so often, the reference, the café—upstairs, through the sprawling stacks, seeing sections of the floor that I’ve never seen before because I had no cause to see them, seeing study rooms along the periphery I never knew existed. When we’re through, we keep talking, and so I suggest we do so outside, not to bother the people trying to study in quiet. We find a park bench and then, when it begins to rain, sit under a stone awning to wait it out. We’re talking about serious things, like God and physics and anthropology, and not-serious things, like Irish dive bars and singing drunk. She laughs at something that I say, leaning over and touching my arm lightly. This is, from everything I’ve read, a Good Sign.

“What are you doing Thursday,” she interjects. Those stereotype-busting feminist girls, I tell you.

“Nothing. You want to hang out?”

“Well, I was wondering if you wanted to sit in on the class I’m a T.A. for.” My heart sinks, just a little. “But I’d like to hang out, too.” My tail perks up slightly.

She’s late for dinner and I’m late for class, so she scribbles down her number before I can even ask, hands it to me with a coy smile and hurries off. A very smart, pleasant, beautiful 22-year-old woman has invited my company, all because I took a moment to do something legitimately nice, without the sleazy taint of ulterior motive. I remind myself to do this more often.

As Sri Krishna, the disguised Lord Vishnu driving a chariot, said to his passenger Arjuna, “Focus your mind in the Lord, free from selfishness and I will give you the thing you desire.” Vishnu has been good to me today.