Doppelgänged

reflections (A) by camil tulcan

We had overlapping houseguests last weekend. My mother-in-law was still here, and we were also playing host to a former student of mine.

What? I have former students? That phrase seems strange to me, but I guess it’s accurate. Back in the 98-99 school year I assisted Ron Osgood in teaching a couple of classes, field and post-production if I recall correctly. It was a great experience for me and an honor to teach with Ron. I learned a lot. Hopefully our undergraduate students learned something as well.

Fast forward a decade plus. Here I am in New Orleans, and I get an e-mail from my former student Eric H. He was coming down here for a conference, and could I recommend some points of interest? I never got around to compiling such a list, but he ended up bunking at our house.

Since it was so many years ago, I didn’t have an image of Eric in mind until I laid eyes on him. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he looks alarmingly similar to yours truly. Tall, slender, kinda Nordic — we even had the same glasses more or less. If I had my typical buzz cut the effect would have been complete. As it was he was mistaken for me by all three other residents of our house over the course of the weekend: that’s my wife, my mother-in-law, and my daughter. In fact, my daughter was a little frightened by this. She ran into my office, saw a man who looked like Daddy, cozied up and then realized it was not Daddy after all. Scary!

Eric is frighteningly intelligent, but he had never been to New Orleans before. When I mentioned the river by way of orientation, he asked, “What river is that?” A little thing called the Mississippi, you may have heard of it. That made me laugh.

All in all, it was a real blast to get reacquainted with Eric, even if it was eerily like to talking to myself in the mirror.

Being a little slow on the uptake, I did not realize that Eric was the author behind the marathonpacks blog which I have been reading off-and-on for years.