1988: Dear Sylvia Padilla and Axel Meijer, We belong here

Dear Sylvia and Axel,

It’s a classic form of hazing.  Who can forget day one of our graduate school when the doors to our classroom opened for our section of ninety students to scramble to find the seat, the one seat, the only seat we would remain in for the entirety of our first year.  Rows of seats within the amphitheater had pet names like “The Warning Track” and “The Upper Deck” intended to typecast your commitment, competitiveness and strategy for completing this rigorous first year.  

I have no idea what my plan was or why I ended up where I did, but I will always remember that I drew a great card sitting between the two of you.  We would scramble in every morning with the anxiety that today might be the day any one of us could be called upon to “open the case”.  There was an unspoken reading of each-other’s faces to decipher our respective sense of readiness and a never spoken but always understood pact that a note or idea would be shared should any of us be caught unprepared.

It was just a really lovely trio of friendship and kinship through a very strange human experience.  

Thanks to you both for sitting where you did,

Ann Simonds

Aka Ann Hoagland

aka Annie Hoagland