[...] These stories would spin out and hook up with others, like the one about the time when Paul got caught by a blizzard on I-89 and spent the better part of a day trapped in his car in the company of a bunch of his own graduate students. These were stories of other times and other parties, essentially, but they served to kindle a new and deeper kind of intimacy. They helped to make us see that this party, our party, was the offspring of all those past parties and thus connected in a long chain of faded social linkages.