I went to the Johns Hopkins University at a time when they were proud of the fact that they did not inflate their grades. If you got an A, you earned it, and some professors prided themselves on being extra tough. Once, when I told Jean McGarry that her then-husband Mark Crispin Miller gave me a B-plus on a paper, she said, “That’s like an A-plus from anyone else.” Gee, thanks. For that I got up at four-thirty in the morning so I could get a spot toward the front of the class registration line.

Because they kept us on tenterhooks about grades, a wicked competition arose among the more mercenary students. Getting an A wasn’t enough . . . you also had to make sure that nobody else did. Thus arose the famed Hopkins “throat” culture, short for “cutthroat.” Some of this had to do with science classes graded on curves, but the bloodthirsty air wafted even into our writing workshops, where we competed to see who could make the nastiest comments about each other’s work. Did you think I got all of my zingers from “Murphy Brown”? I’m telling you, it was dog eat dog in there.

Anyway, our food safety class this week culminated in a multiple-choice test about scary bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites—and the myriad temperatures for dissuading them from growing in your food. The material was actually quite difficult, and my mind refused to memorize a single fact. I had just about given up hope, comforted that at least Amy would save our little establishment from total disgrace, when the hideous little Hopkins student burst out of the basement of my psyche, grabbed the number-two pencil out of my hand, and finished the test in fifteen minutes flat. I was out the door faster than Goblin could devour a piece of chicken she found on the sidewalk. At least, I hope that was chicken.

But anyway, I may have lost the power to incinerate everyone else’s ScanTron sheets using only the power of my mind, but for one, brief, shining moment, in the multi-purpose room of the Maryland State Restaurant Association, the throat culture lived again.