Early in our friendship Margret and I were riding on the train to Waterloo, and I asked her about her PhD. She told me that it was about someone I would never have heard of, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University named John Erskine. Not only had I heard of him, I had met him as a small child when we spent a year in New York so he and my father (a pianist and composer) could collaborate on an opera. How unlikely is that? Margret and I were both stunned by the coincidence. It added a special flavour to our friendship, as did the fact that I had two German-speaking grandchildren!
