What people remember.

When I was twelve, he said: 'I help young people make smaller mistakes than I did.' I think about this every week.

He taught me that a proof is a kind of kindness — you are walking the reader, slowly, somewhere they could not have gone alone. I have taught for thirty years now and I have stolen this from him at least three times a week.

We sat next to each other in 1965 in a class on Wordsworth, and we have not stopped talking since. I called him last Tuesday about a footnote. He said he would think about it. He did not, of course, get the chance. But I will think about it for both of us.

Dada kept a notebook for me from the day I was born. He filled it with things he heard me say. I am twenty-two now, and there are forty-one pages. I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worth them.

He was not a loud man. He was the man who, when the children cried in the night, was already standing in the doorway. Fifty-two years and I do not remember a single morning he did not put the kettle on before me.

I will keep his desk the way it is. The pen on the right, the tea ring on the left, the notebook open to the page he was in the middle of. He used to say that a sentence is a small house you let people into. I am still living in his.