Green Light . . .

You’ve seen me. You won’t remember it, but if you ever visited the University you saw me as I made my way across the campus—or perhaps you caught a glimpse of me sitting in the safety of my office.

Maybe you were here to visit a son or daughter or sweetheart and, pointing me out to your companion, you asked him or her, “What does that fellow do?”

Perhaps they told you, in a manner suggesting they had a profound understanding of the inner workings of the University, that I was probably a professor of this or that subject; or, in a way that implied they had deeper more important truths to worry about, waved their hand in dismissal saying, “Him? Who knows? Probably nothing.”

It’s an attitude we understand.

It's a lesson too late for the learning . . .

My mother-in-law passed away last night.

It was quite sudden, and we were not prepared. I came home from my Japanese class and my wife was not quite frantically phoning her sisters. The sister that still lives in Michigan had called to tell her that their mother had been admitted to the hospital, and that the doctors had said she most likely only had a few hours left.

My father-in-law had taken her to the doctor that morning because she wasn't feeling well, and he had put her in the hospital immediately. She had pneumonia, and then things became terrible. My wife called the hospital. She talked to her father. She called an aunt and told her what was happening, and asked that she go to the hospital and support her dad. She searched online for a flight to Detroit, and kept calling the hospital and her sisters. And somewhere around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, her father called her.

They say it's your birthday . . .

I really don’t remember the ride to the hospital. In fact the whole episode might easily have become one of those sharp but separate scenes that make up, as if from a previous life, the memories of my early youth; but it’s where my life takes on a certain continuity of thought and memory that gives it structure, or more to the point, it’s where I begin. I consider it my birth.