Sunday Sentence

In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist who was then eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he could sit in on the course, and I said yes.

Source: Daniel Mendesohn’s “An Odyssey” (The New Yorker). And I’ll break the rules with some commentary: There are so many “Sunday-sentence” sentences here. I finally gave up trying to select one and chose the very first.