I remember the writer, she was the one who had won the big scholarship, who at the end of the summer session in Prague, said, “I love how you ask questions.” I don’t remember her name, I hope she’s had a good career. I had asked Jack Myers how he squared writing about his loved ones in his poems. I was so awed by his answer I don’t remember it. And I had asked Robert Olen Butler why his Leda and the Swan was presented as a consensual affair, instead of a rape like in other tellings of the myth. And I was curious! But he thought I was asking a gotcha, and his wheels spun, and he flailed defensively. And since then I think I should have asked it more as a gotcha.

I mean he was done GOT.

In Prague, Danielle and I and a few others would get up early to walk through the castle to class. We would sing and sing. It was then I really realized, really put it together, how my brain handles emotions as a soundtrack. Positive or negative, in times of high emotion, my inner disc jockey fills the airways, and I’ll find myself singing songs about thoughts I didn’t realize I was having. Now I know to listen up: Oh, Paul Simon’s “Crazy Love?” Uh-oh. “96 Tears?” Lookout!

I think, too, of when I asked the survivor of the Holocaust about his relationship with God. I was curious! The docent pulled my aside after, to tell me it wasn’t appropriate to ask that sort of question. But the man himself had no qualms. He answered straight, straight away, “I still believe. I have questions, but I still believe.”

Remember that I interviewed Question Mark of the Mysterians? BUT IT WAS I WHO ASKED THE QUESTIONS. Who’s crying now?