White bird with a blue stripe down its head and back?

I spent a good part of the summer of 1996 in a failing café in Berkeley, California. Four semesters had passed since the beginning of graduate school, and while things were beginning to look up, I worried this was only in a relative sense. I had entered a PhD program in order to study modern Hebrew literature, but my initial excitement was obliterated by the painful realization that my uneven street Hebrew wasn’t worth a damn when it came to Bialik, and moreover, I didn’t really know how to study literature in the first place. Somehow—maybe because I was being funded or because my only fear greater than failure was admitting failure—I hadn’t dropped out, and now, two years later, I was beginning to find my footing. And I was in this café, this empty café, because I needed a place to hide as I crawled, weary and exhilarated, through a 277-page-long paragraph that I felt might just make it all worth it: Yaakov Shabtai’s Zikhron Devarim, translated into English as Past Continuous.