Walked into school classroom on time as usual to find only one man in the room. We took a look at the call out sheet and saw that it named the person who’d actually been there last night — to a full group of 8 or 9, but not this regular attender, who’d been at work — as tonight’s instructor. I can’t know for certain, but guess that everyone there last night assumed that the call out for tonight listing the same person from last night was mistaken.  That would also account for the one person who did show up (who’d not been there last night) coming with that instructor’s book.

We did not talk about the assigned reading, which I’ll have to prepare again before our meeting in two weeks (my mind is sadly like that);  not that he’d not read it, in fact everyone in the group has long ago raced way ahead of me in our very readable Bakewell book, but because the group will of course want to pick up where we left off last time.

We had a good talk about his college aspirations after he’s released, and I expect him to do very well, for one thing, he’s become a bona fide reader because of our book group, which he mentioned tonight with some astonishment, and a lot of pleasure. He also reminded me that we’d closed the Boétie conversation last time with the question of how when many people want to talk we can get other people to listen. He’d been thinking about it and had some ideas. I asked him to hang on to them for another couple of weeks until our next meeting.

I stayed for a bit more than an hour, until the guards, who’d expected him to opt to leave for rec when it became clear that there would be no actual group meeting, came by to urge me to go home. They took themselves to be liberating me, and I got the message, so I did.