• Tag Archives college
  • See You In September

    Lughnasa                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

    The end of the day.  The time when the season turns on a pivot toward fall and away from the Solstice.  My mood has shifted to melancholic.  Not sure why.  Maybe the end of the day, the time of year.  It is around this time in the year when I turn melancholy, a sort of seasonal affective disorder, perhaps more related, to the nearness of the school year.

    No, not because of any negative associations with school.  No, maybe because I’m not going back to school.  Not anymore.  School was good to me.  I got lots of strokes from lots of folks, school was feel good time for me.  Yes, I had some troubles that happened during school, but they were extra curricular, the school part, that always grooved.

    Well, not quite always.  That first year at Wabash I encountered German.  German and I did not get along.  I found myself near mid-semester and staring at a D.  A D!  I graduated at the top of my high school class.  I didn’t get D’s.  But I was about to get one.  So, I dropped it.  Not my finest hour academically, but it did save my bacon.  Why was I taking German?  I wanted to read philosophers in their own languages and German seemed like a good place to start.

    Other than that first semester at Wabash, school was fun.  I enjoyed learning, studying, taking tests, writing papers.  Weird, huh?  Now when See You In September begins to play on the oldy stations, my nostalgia meter hits a high.

    Hmmm.  Just occurred to me.  This may be the way successful athletes feel when the school year starts, in those day after their career has ended.  Those were the best years of my life.  That sort of feeling.

    No.  That’s not it.  Those weren’t the best years of my life.  These are the best years. Right now.

    It may explain why I keep throwing myself into things like the docent program, learning Latin, Tai Chi, always going for the burn that comes from conquering a learning curve.  That life long education idea really took hold in me.  I believe in it, body and soul.

    Though I do, each year when the evening’s cool, the leaves begin to change and parents start packing their kids up to take them off to college, I wish, a part of me wishes, I could go along with them.

    Here’s something a bit strange.  The song that always comes to mind for me at this time of year is See You In September by the Happenings.  Here’s a youtube version filmed on Lake Calhoun.


  • My Friend

    Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

    Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

    Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

    When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

    Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.


  • The Moratorium Years Didn’t Work Out so Well for Me

    29  90%  26%  5mph NNE bara29.84  falls windchill25 Imbolc

                     Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

    In spite of the fact that this is Minnesota, how soon we forget, I had REI all to myself this morning.  Monday morning shoppers scared back into their easy chairs by, gasp, SNOW.  OK, I did think about turning around and heading back, then “I am a Minnesotan and I am not afraid,” soared through my mind and on I drove.  Slippin’ and slidin’ to the mall.  Just like when I was a kid and we had to walk four blocks all the way downtown to buy a pair of shoes.

    Anyhow, a helpful young lady, blond and cheerful, quite normal except for the hoop through the right nostril, which, I suppose, makes her normal in that world formerly inhabited by adults now over 60, guided me through the hiking/walking show selection process.  The first pair pretty much fit me, though they were a little snug.  Then, “Oh.  These are a women’s 8!”  Wouldn’t you know?  Still we did find an appropriately masculine pair of Keens, “They started out making water shoes so they know slick rock.”  One of the problems in hiking Hawai’i is water slicked rock;  I’ve learned this with bruised ankles more than once.

    Nearer to  home at the Anoka Co-op I went searching for Minnesota cheese (Bongards, in this case) and Minnesota bread (oddly, Holy Land Pocket Bread, made in Minneapolis) for my presentation at the Woolly retreat.  Then, sliding my way back home.

    All the while I listened to Tom Wolfe’s  I Am Charlotte Simmons.   Anyone who encountered college after academic stardom in a small-town high school, like me for instance, can identify all the over place with Charlotte Simmons, the little mountain girl from Sparta, North Carolina and a Presidential Scholarship.  Well, I never had a Presidential Scholarship, but there’s some connection, anyhow.  Wolfe has made a living out of closely observed novels of manners of our time, a sort of Dickensian project in hip, post-modern tongue in cheek prose.  This one may not be great literature, but it’s a great time-machine back to those magic years when everything seemed possible, if only you could figure anything out. 

    Those moratorium years didn’t work out so well for me.  Instead of sticking to my guns or buckling down with heroic intention fortified by small town common sense and parental support, I got drunk, wasted, started smoking and wandered without purpose for so many years I don’t even know when I stopped.  Sigh.  Oh, I did fine academically, but not as well as I might have without the marijuana and hash–yes, I inhaled–the LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, beer, 151 rum, cognac and single-malt scotch.  I floated out of college and stayed afloat all through seminary and well into my first years in the ministry. 

    Treatment.  Second divorce.  Flounder around.  Discover writing and Kate in the same year.  Now, in my final third of life, I’ve picked up steam and gotten the ole head and heart straightened out.  Thank Mother Earth.  Still, it is really better late than never.  I’m living proof.