Way back in the day, in the vintage 1990’s, I formed a writer’s group with three Dartmouth friends: Brian Bajari, Peter Barnes, and David Lewis Neel. Brian, like me, was a recently graduated English major, Peter was a current Philosophy major, and David was a Ph.D candidate in Mathematics. David, of the four of us, was and still is the king of readers, a person with a lifelong, voracious and joyful habit of reading across disciplines and genres. In the years since our first meetings as a writer’s group, I have watched how David’s intellectual engagement with books has strengthened his heart and soul, giving him a resilience that allowed him to survive a devastating personal loss with a phenomenal level of grace and love.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary storytelling, so I asked David to take over the writing this week because he has a Christmas story to tell that is strong enough and brave enough to salve our 2020-weary, Covid-exhausted, winter-tired souls. —Courtney
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