Coming and goings:

1) One day in late summer, my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker came up to me, and told me that she was moving in 2 weeks to a different state, to be with family there and to work there, as a house-painter.

Afterwards, for those 2 short weeks, every time I was working with her, I would say something like, "[Her name], sabes que voy llorar tan mucho sin te" ("[Her name], you know that I am going to cry so much without you"), or, "Sin te, voy llorar cado dia" ("Without you, I'm going to cry everyday").

The last day we worked together, she gave me a hug.

2) Around town in the (college) town that I now live in, someone came up to me when I was sitting down at the local brewery and having a beer and doing some research work, and it turned out to be one of my old writing students from years ago, one of the last undergraduate cohorts if not the very last undergraduate cohort that I taught.

As it turns out, she graduated right when the pandemic hit, and was lucky to find work as a nanny for several years to ride it out, and now she's in grad school for an area where she has an in and might have a chance for upward mobility.

Interestingly, although people from her graduation year really struggled with graduating into the pandemic and finding work, she said, she was surprised that her money as a nanny wasn't really that much different from the allegedly more-professional jobs that other people she knew ended up finding (i.e., she observed the same wage compression that I've been noticing in my own life; in so many ways, I professionally pattern like or at least can identify with younger generations, because of my need to start over professionally at several points in my recent life).