Back to Nassau Hall

Saturday night we gave Edith a tough assignment on our post-dinner trip uptown for ice cream: See if you can spot someone wearing black and orange. We hadn't yet parked before she was pointing out Halloweenish costumes all over the place. We stood in the unusually long line for T. Sweets ice cream behind a black jacket featuring a tiger tail twisted into the number "2008" and in front of a blazer in wide orange-and-black vertical stripes adorned with an oversized button proclaiming "'83 nation."

Once again, it was annual tiger-spotting season in Princeton, when the older members of the pack return to their former hunting grounds for several days of ritualistic behavior, predatory display, and (de)hydration. Due to thunderstorms and a conflicting nap schedule, we missed the most extraordinary moment in the annual rites, when the beasts stalk in organized procession, symbolically reclaiming their former territory. But we observed a few specimens up close at the ice cream shop and joined them for their intricately choreographed display of pyrotechnic dominance after dark. Edith was a close observer of the symbolic forms: "That reminds me of a peacock's tail," and "That's like a rainbow" (pronounced a good fifteen seconds before "Over the Rainbow" began to play on the loudspeakers).

Unfortunately Edith will miss communing with a former generation of bulldogs in Connecticut this coming weekend; instead she will being indulging the chance to contemplate Cayuga's waters with ten-year veteran...big reds??

Meanwhile, you know you're a graduate student when Stephen Colbert is speaking about 50 yards from where you're having coffee, and you can't be bothered to step outside to hear him because you have to craft a syllabus for next year's crop of unsuspecting tiger cubs. I did watch him getting into his limo, on my walk from the coffee shop back to the library. These days that counts as major excitement.