The Professor in My Back SeatStar Tribune

It was a normal workday, which is usually when the strange and important things happen.

I was trying to land a job in tech as a business intelligence analyst, but in the meantime I was driving for Lyft because it was a quick, reliable way to make ends meet. It was a cool fall day in the Twin Cities, the kind of day where the air feels sharpened, and I picked up an older man from his apartment to take him to lunch with a friend at On's, the Thai restaurant on University Avenue near the University of Minnesota.

There was a Bob Dylan song playing on 89.3 The Current. I am not a huge Dylan fan, which in Minnesota is close to civic treason, but I am a transplant from Detroit and still claim certain exemptions. The passenger and I started talking about Dylan anyway.

Then, without ceremony or fanfare, he mentioned that he had been at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

I knew enough to know what that meant. Dylan going electric. Folk purists losing their minds. A cultural hinge squeaking open in real time. And here, sitting in the back seat of my car, was a man who had been there.

The man's name was Michael Kac.

The ride was short, but the conversation wasn't small. In a few minutes, we moved through music, memory, language, and whatever invisible current makes two strangers realize they are not quite strangers after all. Before he got out, we exchanged numbers.

We met for lunch the following week at On's, which has since become the main place we meet. He told me he had been in a Philadelphia band in the late sixties called The Mandrake Memorial: psych-rock with a baroque streak, three records on Poppy between 1968 and 1970, opening slots for the Doors and Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. He played a prototype electric harpsichord called the Rock-Si-Chord. He left the band in 1969, went to UCLA for a Ph.D., and eventually joined the University of Minnesota faculty.

Michael told me about his childhood in Ithaca, New York, and living in Switzerland. We discussed his distinguished father Mark Kac, the Polish-American mathematician who pioneered probability theory and asked the famous question, "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" He told me what it had been like to grow up inside a household headed by such a person: the rigor, the patterning, the critical thinking, and how it shaped his ear for structure and meaning.

He spoke as someone whose life had moved through several worlds: music, mathematics, philosophy, teaching, language. The remarkable thing was not only what he had done. It was how he told it.

There was no performance in it. No résumé recitation. No grand old-man monologue demanding awe from the younger person across the table. He told the truth of his life matter-of-factly, as though everyone's biography contained a psychedelic band, Newport, Switzerland, a famous mathematician for a father, and a career spent thinking deeply about how language works.

He never bragged.

Which, of course, made the whole thing more astonishing.

Early on, I tried to bring up politics in a general way. He smiled and quipped, "Surely we haven't run out of enough important things to talk about that we're resorting to politics."

It was funny, but it also clarified something.

These lunches were not the drab exchange of weather, errands, headlines, and complaints that so often passes for conversation. They were pointed. They were playful. They had direction. Sometimes they came with homework.

One of Michael's great passions is classical music. He gives me pieces to look up by composers I have never heard of. He asks me to think about aspects of the English language I have never thought to question. A phrase, a construction, a sound, a habit of speech I have used my whole life without ever really noticing suddenly becomes strange and alive under his attention.

He was teaching me, but disguising it as conversation.

Maybe that is one of the marks of a great educator: someone who never really stops teaching, but does it so gracefully that it feels less like instruction and more like dialogue.

We started meeting in the fall of 2024. Over time, On's has become a ritual. The conversations have widened from music and language into the territory of real friendship: friends long gone, important people in our lives, having families spread across the world; and the strange turns that life can take even at its most ordinary.

I am forty now, which is a strange age. You are old enough to feel some real distance from your younger self, but not old enough to have earned much wisdom about it. Forty can make you feel suddenly ancient in one room and absurdly young in another.

Michael is a man who has never picked.

He left psych-rock for linguistics and never stopped playing. He has published in semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics, and he still teaches courses on logic, Mozart, and what is so great about classical music. He has been a professor and a performer for so long that the slash between the two has worn away.

Sitting across from him, watching a life still in motion at 83, has done something to my understanding of what middle age is supposed to be for. I had thought of it as a narrowing. He is evidence that it need not be.

His memory is unlike anyone's I have ever encountered. His power of recollection is architectural. He does not simply remember events; he seems to remember the rooms around them and can transport you along with him.

I once repaired his banjo for him, and he is still performing.

That feels right to me: the professor, the linguist, the former psychedelic musician, still carrying an instrument into a room.

Sometimes Michael feels larger than life. There seems to be nothing he cannot talk about. We have talked about Scandinavia and a shared love of northern places, and the fact that he once took the same ferry between Denmark and Iceland via the Faroes that my wife did. That is how conversations with him tend to go.

But the point of writing about Michael is not to congratulate him, or myself, or our friendship.

The point is simpler than that.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, a person like that gets into your back seat on a cool fall day. A song comes on the radio. You ask one more question than you had to. They answer.

A conversation begins.

And then, if you keep showing up, the conversation becomes something else. A ritual. A friendship. A reminder that people are not the first three facts we learn about them. They are whole weather systems, whole archives, whole songs still being played in rooms we did not know existed.

I am glad I asked.