"There is a distinctive cool cinderblock smell to math departments everywhere. Conference posters fluttering on the office doors, the glossy canary-yellow spines of Springer textbooks. A red-bearded man in black socks and sandals walks amiably down the hall carrying a cup of coffee and a pad of paper, a one-armed wristwatch pinned to his breast pocket. I am six years old, and the daylight from the window at the end of the hall next to my father’s office casts a cloudy oblong reflection down its length. Inside, my clay stegosaurus stands diffidently atop his gray metal filing cabinet. Looking up at the smudged blackboard, the most insistent chirping chalk equations are boxed, marked do not erase."