After graduating from De La Salle High School and the University of Minnesota, then completing an M.A. at the University of Chicago, I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Niger, where I spent two years teaching and learning. My professional life after that largely involved Africa. I worked for CARE in Niger, completed a Ph.D. at Minnesota that entailed lots of Africa research, then, in 1986, joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I spent my career, interrupted now and then by work in Kenya, Niger, Chad, Senegal, and Kyrgyzstan. I retired last year, as did my wife, a professor, and and we moved to Minnesota, where we’re still fixing up the fixer-upper we bought near the river in St. Paul.

My life since leaving Annunciation has mostly been good and interesting, but of course there have been plenty of struggles, disappointments, and failures too. Most noteworthy, my first marriage ended in a divorce. On the positive personal side, I’ve been happily remarried for many years; I have two fine sons, one an assistant professor at Clark University, the other a computer scientist in Madison; I have a fine step-daughter, who is an academic advisor here in the Twin Cities. There are no grandchildren as of yet, but that could come. Or not. We’ll see. I’m happy.

I often think back on our years at Annunciation, about many of you, and about our teachers. For every dozen things I wish I’d been able to do differently (for instance, be a less shy, self-absorbed pre-teen; for instance, ignore cliques and popularity; for instance, actually try to keep up in math after our bizarre, never-ending seventh-grade foray into non-base-ten number systems) there are a dozen things that Annunciation did right. And there are dozens and dozens of valuable lessons and kindnesses that we classmates received from each other.

I’d like to go back to the Annunciation playground and play keep-away, which I loved like life itself, or pom, tackle or not, and maybe venture over the line to the prohibited girls’ side. I’d like to talk to Sister Lorcan and Mrs. Redding, Sister Leonie too, and thank them for their excellence. I’d like Mrs. Redding to reread The Boxcar Children to all of us. I’d like to meet our sixth-grade art teacher, whatever her name was, a student teacher from the University, an authentic hippie as far as I could tell, glamorous and scary, mostly glamorous. I’d like my mom to pack Fritos in my bag lunch more often. But since none of these things is possible, I’ll only wish all of you the very best, apologize for any way I might have disappointed you, and thank you (or Sister Marie Catherine or somebody) for us mostly being decent to each other. I say all of this realizing that some of you will be thinking, “Jim who?” It’s funny that there were only about 120 of us but some of us never overlapped with each other in a class or connected particularly. Recollections of those few persons are vague. For me that’s about 10 or 15 persons. All the rest? Many sharp memories of many kinds.