i just got back from a wonderful dinner!
prof sastry invited all of us (from the berkeley experience seminar) to dinner at his home in el cerrito. his home and the area around it are lovely (the view, especially, is magnificent), the food was excellent and plentiful, i think i speak for everyone when i say we all bonded even more, and his grandkids were cute. 🙂
i’m very happy and quite full. 🙂
[note, 4/10/14: Imported from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
How special that your professor had you and your classmates to his home and you got to meet his grandkids and everything! I remember the first time a beloved professor invited me and my classmates over for a meal/gathering/picnic at her home, it felt soooo special. Her name is Alix. She made us the most delicious mango chicken quesadillas on the grill in the courtyard of the property in which she lived. I adored Alix. The fact that we were welcomed into her home and that she cooked (this extraordinary meal) for us and that we could hang out together in this sweet social way was really astounding to me. This professor taught a Freshman Seminar, “Literary Gender-Benders,” so all of the students in the class were freshman and we were exploring all of this really gender-nonconforming literature that was also often really sexy and really thought provoking and having all of these extraordinary conversations about things that I’d never known it was okay to think about, let alone *talk* about. I wrote a piece of writing in that class that would help launch my career as a performance poet. I would skate by her office all the time (for the entire time I was at Cal) and pop in and talk about sex and literature and love and life. I was in awe that a real adult would have real conversations with me about sex – at school! And sometimes I would pop over to her home unannounced (back when that wasn’t so weird) to say hi. She even set me up (romantically) with her niece and we dated for some time (I just read some entries on my own diary that mention the sweet beginnings of that romantic connection). My friend Andrew who I just went to Mexico with was in that class (and Alix still remembers how enthusiastically he guzzled down the beans she’d made at that party), as was Samin Nosrat (though she was just another Cal student then). Alix and I are really treasured friends now. So many sweet memories sparked from your journal entry about dinner at your professor’s house.
All of this is so amazing. I love how much this meant to you at the time, and now. I think I still remember every time I went to a professor’s house for shared meals in both undergrad and grad school. Tbh going to Yoko’s for lab last month had so much the same feel for me 🙂 Except this time I was also the professor, kind of!!
Yeah, these are such sweet memories to revisit and to share with each other. The feelings of such a place and time, the richness of what was meaningful to us then, and some of the resonances there. I love imagining some of that with Yoko, as she’s been a professor, as it were, for you and now you’re getting to be a professor for her.
It’s such an incredibly meaningful exchange for me, with her! And with you 🙂