Many, many people knew the small, elegant figure in a gold silk sari, zigzagging around town, often at high speed, from the Sanskrit class she led at UCSB to the World Religions classes she taught for decades at City College to the tai chi class she was attending and Trader Joe’s and a lecture at the museum and the class she chose to teach in her eighties at the Braille Institute. I got used to showing up at CVS — almost anywhere, in fact — and hearing, “How’s your wife today? She’s such a neat lady!”
“Not my wife,” I’d say. “My mother. But I can see why you made the mistake.”
We could barely step into a restaurant without someone coming up shyly and saying, “Excuse me. You won’t remember me, but I was your student, in Philosophy, 40 years ago. You really changed my life!”