The 16 year old accident victim I wrote of has improved to the point that the doctors have decided to start waking her out of the medically induced coma and take her off the ventilator. She is still in very rough shape, but we have positives for the first time in a bad, bad week.

Yesterday I had a positive of my own. An administrator from the Utah Festival Opera company called me to offer a contract for this summer. That’s Loralee Choate country, for those of you readers who also follow her.

I was very flattered to be offered, and turned it down with great regret. Unfortunately I am under contract for this summer right here at BSU. I encouraged them to keep me in mind for next year–with a little more lead time. If they can do that, I can make sure not to commit to teaching in the summer.

Still, it was very cool to be asked.

The sky is clear, but for the sun. In the courtyard I see students en route through this, the last day of classes for this year. They smile, wear summer clothes.

I just talked to a friend via telephone. He is in his daughter’s hospital room. Two nights ago she, a new driver in her first car, drove off an overpass, crushing her car and her liver. Her life’s first surgery was that evening. Her seventh will be this morning. She does not speak. In that room her mother and father and sister watch her breathe.

And outside, I see

After a week and a half of eyeball busting work I’m briefly at an intermission. Another torrent of papers will arrive shortly, but for the next twenty minutes I’m sort of caught up.

This is a beautiful day, our first of eighty degree sun and shorts. Outside my office window I can see students and one professor sitting on benches in the bright light, with blue coolers that open now and then to reveal cool drinks. They take turns throwing what look like beanbags at smooth white ramps that have holes in them. Getting the beanbag into the hole is the goal. It looks reminiscent of horseshoe. I’m sure all this is highly educational. It looks wonderful. Occasionally I hear a shout of approval when a beanbag hits the hole.

Suddenly I’m remembering playing horseshoe with my Dad. Toward the end he couldn’t play very well, but early in my life he played well. I remember him playing in the back yard with friends. They’d play until dark, and then keep playing after they couldn’t see the stakes. They’d pitch at a guess, and then at the sparks. Amazing how many ringers they made when they were throwing from muscle memory alone.

The work I’ve been doing, reading the words of others, is a curious combination of being with people who aren’t there. I read in my office, alone, though I hear voices. At this moment I can be in my office alone watching the group outside and be in my office alone and faintly, all too faintly, be with my father and his friends at the backyard horseshoe pits.

A moment of odd perspective.

I’m off to class and a new batch of papers/portfolios.

Insane. End of term. Papers.

Candidates for a fixed-term position to interview.

Papers.

More papers.