End and Begin

April 30, 2010

I'm putting the cruel, but beautiful month* to bed in style tonight. Susan Leining and the Santa Fe PALs (Peer Assisted Leadership) group is hosting a Girls Night Out for 5th through 8th graders down in Brazoria County, and Walter and I are making the drive down so that I can be the featured speaker on "loving who you are."

I know many of you have jealous feelings towards me because I taught my last class of the semester yesterday. I still have some grading obligations and a final the week after next, but it felt good shaking each student's hand and wishing them well as they left the room (this is my "close parentheses" on my first day of class, when I shake each student's hand, introduce myself, and ask them to do the same with each other).

I have had a couple of hmm moments lately. Tuesday night (about 8:00) while waiting at a stop light, a pick up truck turned left in front of me. The driver wore sunglasses and a spiffy sports coat and tie. The woman on the passenger side looked equally fancied-up, coiffed hair and (from what I could see) a blouse not designed for yard work. The hmm? A lovely golden retriever sitting erectly in the front seat between the two of them. I still, for the life of me, can't think of where the three of them might have been headed.

The Sunday before that I was driving on this short cross street around midday, with no other cars on the road.


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Except for the restaurant on the northwest corner of the street, all the business were closed. [NOTE: If you aren't familiar with Google Earth. You can move up and down the street by dragging your cursor on the arrowheads in the street and you can twirl yourself to see what's going on to your right and left by clicking on the compass points in the upper left hand corner of the image. I was about halfway down the street, between the grocery and the restaurant.] What made me say hmm? I saw a lone soap bubble (about three inches in diameter) just floating down the sidewalk. Not a soul in sight.

Several of you (my facebook friends and those of you who check on the Davhee Repore independently of Let's Do It!) know that Davis recently received the James Street Fulton Prize, but if you haven't seen the description, it's worth a click!

I'd like to end with a little fun (although Pat, I'm not sure if you feel the same way about Muppets that you do about clowns, if so skip the video) in honor of Davis who is moving from the relative security of the Rice campus into the larger world and for the rest of us who also find that "We Can't Go Back Now."







*I considered April to be cruel long before Erin died. As a student, the world exploded with green and flowers everywhere, just when classes demanded the most attention, the library called winsomely, and papers and project grew out of control. Becoming a professor didn't change the game, just the side of the desk I sat on. I still had mountains of work. It had just morph from writing to grading, from studying to listening to distraught students.