Teshome never held office hours; he had a quiet disdain for indoor spaces. You couldn't really find him anywhere by appointment and certainly could not reach him on the phone. You could count on the fact that at some point in the day—every day—he would be waiting under this tree. Well, to be fair, waiting isn't the right word, for he had no sense of waiting, as he had no sense of the temporal discrepancy between being and doing. Time was always in a state of plenitude for him, in the most palpable sense of time-space continuum I have ever seen in my life. He carried his most precious intellectual things in his mind—and in his pocket, his coat pocket. He would carry what he considered valuable correspondence, with envelopes perfectly intact, in his coat pockets for months on end—we used to say that his pockets were perfectly abyssal—along with hand-scripted notes of fragments of ideas. In the midst of animated conversation, in which he would have been mostly silent, it was common to see him take out a piece of paper from his coat pocket, scribble down a few words, and place it right back amid the numerous envelopes.

It all begins with an idea.