Reading a story that isn’t mine
But could be
I too was good at math (but not until high school)
I too went to high school in New Rochelle and took math classes at a local college
I too went to Hampshire College but I didn’t have two boy friends at a time
(or even one) until grad school at UMass Amherst, down the road
I wonder if the author knows old friends of mine
Yes they are getting old those young upstarts who started Hampshire College
some twenty five plus years ago
I wondered if I hadn’t left some pages of my journal in a time warp
Only to find them again, edited by another and in print
Like the woman in Blade Runner who thought her thoughts were her own until learning
that she was a machine and the memories of childhood were implanted in her fabricated
mind
We two had both failed in French
But then our paths more strongly divided
I could tell where the narrative was no longer my own
And breathed a sigh of relief
My life was my own again
My identity intact
My tale left for me to tell
Where he told of Galois, I would have told of Turing
An English mathematician, equally eccentric though not as flambouyant
Living in a differently violent time
Key to breaking the German naval codes
And then left to kill himself when his drive for sex with men brought him into
court and rather than follow in Wilde’s footsteps to jail, was placed in the
kinder hands of a medical establishment that fed him hormones and percipitated
his suicide.
But that’s a diversion from this tale
Of how I picked up a magazine and started reading a story called Two Mathematicians
And had flashbacks to my life when I was less than half my age
And learned (or relearned) some math history
And wondered about the boys and men I studied with and where we’ve come to.
And saw a reflection that caught me, surprised,
By words in print that I knew to be true.