An eye for the extraordinary

Annie Dillard died yesterday. I was looking for Bird by Bird on my shelves yesterday (by Anne Lamott). I know it is here — because there is no longer anywhere else — but I kept bumping into Dillard. The Writing Life. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That weasel essay. I gave it up for the day.

Today I tried again. Book by book. But no Bird by Bird. Instead I pulled Dillard's The Writing Life off the shelf. Its bristling with sticky notes, notes from past Michelle to present Michelle, I suppose. Or a note from the universe to remember Annie Dillard's gifts to me.

I gave the reading at the undergraduate commencement this spring. Traditionally the choice of reading is left to the person giving the reading. And of course, it should be short. The students I had taught in the first year writing seminar were graduating and I wanted something that might reach back to that class (titled  “Women who see through walls” and reading women poets, mystics and scientists — and some people who crossed those lines). I decided no wild life from Mary Oliver . “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by the late Becky Elson (an astrophyscist and poet) felt a little too dark for this event. Annie Dillard’s weasel essay called to me, but also felt a bit violent..stalking your calling? But Dillard? Yes, Dillard! I used a piece from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek written when she was young (though not quite as young as the graduates.) There is some stalking, but no blood.

"For the scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, humanists, poets, writers, for all of you who have peered through the walls of the universe, dug under them, clambered over them, taken them apart, and made something new…stone by stone. From Annie Dillard, “The Waters of Separation” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time…unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock…they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn and unlock—more than a maple— a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.” 

(Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harpers, 1974, p. 269)

 

Done is good

Bryn Mawr has a saying, “Done is good.” It’s our version of “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Sometimes you just have to stop and say, “It’s done, and I am good with that.” Even if you could do more. Even if you can’t do more. It’s time to hand that thesis in, to take that final, to call it a day. Or a career. Done is good. Even if I could keep going. Even if I could not.

Commencement is always bittersweet, with an admixture of relief. The walk back across campus at the end of the day always feels like a moment of transition, leaving behind the chaos of Garden Party (which is exactly what it sounds like, a party in a garden with circles of chairs and tea sandwiches and cookies and ice cold lemonade — for more than a thousand people) for the serene and contemplative scholarly space that is summer. Past the empty tent, down through the arched oaks. 

The wispy ghosts of past commencements drift past. Most of the students I have taught I will never see again. We have spent hundreds of hours together, I can recognize many of their footsteps in the hall before they tap on my door. Gone, but also still with me. Faint outlines of two late colleagues lounge on the Moon Bench, looking back at me, whispering "Done is good!" 

This walk was particularly poignant, though it may not be my last. I can always choose to go to commencement, and for the next few years, when students I have taught will graduate, I may indeed go. But I will be a ghost of sorts, drifting in and out.

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Bryn Mawr gives its emerti faculty a medal to commemorate the event. You wear it to commencement. 

The Last Lecture

On the first of May, I gave what I imagine was my very last lecture in a chemistry course. This was not the last lecture of the movies, where a grizzled professor in a tweed jacket waxes philosophical about life within the ivory tower, students hanging on his every word. This was not the poignant last lecture of a computer scientist in khakis and a polo. It was just my usual last lecture of introductory chemistry: on nuclear chemistry, on rads and rems and banana equivalent dose and how nuclear reactors work. And about the pile in the squash court at University of Chicago. (“Was it ever used to play squash on again?” wondered a student.) And when I was done, I wished them a good summer.

It was how I wanted to end my teaching days, with a solid lecture, not a flashy performance, covering material that mattered. To finish as I had gone along all these years, with the needs of my students directing what and how I structured a course, a lecture, an assignment. With an eye out to what might matter for the world. 

It felt like a good landing, and one that I could not have managed without a generous portion of chemistry, given how my own neurochemical machinery was misbehaving. What was utterly impossible the previous time I had  taught this course — writing on the blackboard, scrawling comments on student papers — was once again possible. What was then merely difficult — constructing notes on the iPad, walking down the hall, gesturing at the board, projecting my voice — I can now do without thinking. I am grateful for the chance to retire on my own terms and not because Parkinson’s is pushing me out. I am grateful for the all the pieces and people that made this possible, from the meds to the 50 grams of metal on my Bic pen. PTs and OTs, neurologists and psychologists, spiritual directors and pastors, colleagues and friends and family. I absolutely could not have done this without all the help. 

There have been celebrations and notes and recorded greetings. Crash crashed my retirement party, appearing unannounced at the door last weekend from the other side of the Atlantic. His brother, Math Guy, said they had something to drop off. He wasn’t kidding. And I still have work to do, a couple of letters of recommendation left to write, grades to assign (finals are graded!). Saturday I will march in commencement and get the last word before I, and this last class of students, walk out of the tent and into whatever is next. 

One last time

 

We have a mature thunder plum out front, which blossoms every spring and shades the driveway in the depths of summer. It leans out from under the protection of the great oak, which is 75 years old. A youngster by comparison. Last year I noticed it had developed a fungus, black crusts on a few branches. I've seen this before and I knew what it meant. Soon all the branches would be covered. There would be a last bloom and then the tree would have to become something else. 

I'm down to the last 8 classes of my teaching career, one last season to bloom as a teacher, then I, too, will be something else. (Though thankfully not covered with a fungus!) 

I will learn to say when asked what I do, "I write."

Putting on the brakes

I have stomped on the brakes, and stepped into spring break. The lawn is still dotted with pockets of snow, even though the bitter cold has finally broken. I longed for warmth that didn’t involve putting on so many layers I felt like a toddler decked out in a snow suit, unable to move. So the three of us — me, Math Man and his golf clubs — went somewhere warm, driving to the airport in a bubble of early morning fog and mist, by lunch we were having lunch and watching whales breach from a perch on the cliffs in a warm place with cool breezes. Like magic.

No email, I told Math Man. No desire for a mad crazy sightseeing schedule. Beach walks, good meals and rest. I realized by the second day that I had activated my “retreat” mode. Rest, pray, read. Walk. Repeat. Lean into the quiet and the sound of the waves. Float. Take some advice from Ireneus: rest in the hand of God.

When we return there will be 7 weeks left of my teaching career. Then I will be stepping on the brakes again, far more firmly. Eighteen more lectures to give, four more recitation sessions to run. A final exam and on the 5th of May, after the final exam, it’s a wrap. Except for the grading. And the packing. 

Elon's Fermi problem

Elon Musk posted a table on X claiming that enormous numbers of social security payments are being made fraudulently, as much as 83%. That seemed...excessive. I teach my students Enrico Fermi's technique for getting quick estimates, good enough numbers to help direct you toward a more accurate solution. Also great for detecting bullshit. Let's see how it works for Elon's claim!

One way to estimate roughly the number of social security recipients is to say everyone in the US over 65 collects it.  (Not true, but Fermi's approach says look at the big effects.)  In 2023 that was 59.2 million people. The Social Security Administration says that the average annual payment is $24,000. So that means we should pay out 59,200,000 x $24,000 a year. That's about $1.4 trillion. What did Social Security pay out in 2023? Its total budget was...wait for it..about $1.4 trillion. Just what you'd expect. So, BS, Elon.

This may be the biggest fraud ever, but I don't think the payments are the problem.

The season for changes

It's September, the season has changed from summer to fall (though the temperature feels anything but fall-like today). Classes start at the college tomorrow, and I am thinking about changes. (If you also now have David Bowie's Changes as an earworm, I apologize, or consider it the soundtrack to this blog post.) 

Like the caterpillars, so much changes for me at this point in the year. My schedule changes. Inflexible classes plant themselves in my calendar, meetings sprout like weeds around them. My tasks change, too. I need to find time for office hours and grading and class prep. I will have new students and new colleagues. I am teaching a new class this year and team teaching general chemistry for the first time ever (in this my 40th year of college teaching). My office was renovated over the summer, so that's a change, too. (My door opens on the other side and the light switch has moved. I keep swiping at the wall when I come in. Habits are hard to break.) So many little changes.

But I'm also thinking about longer-term changes. What would it be like to retire? A big change that will cascade into many small changes. What's the next big writing project I want to undertake? It feels so odd to be looking at space in my calendar that doesn't have "writing" in it, after all these months of working on the book on tea. There are more changes to come, I expect.

Photo of new office, just like the old office, but with fewer books. (Really.)

Resistance

Should I spend some time this morning working on my syllabus? It's a cool day at the beach and perhaps that is why I am feeling the tug of the school year. Or perhaps it's because I read an opinion piece in The Atlantic that claims the syllabus is dead. (Because you can make an update-able electronic version? Because now it's customary to put a lot of policies on it, which somehow dilutes the scholarly value of the reading list and schedule?)  

I am trying to resist. I have been seriously unbusy for the last 10 days, leaning into the joy of being away where I can't clear off my desk or tidy the living room. Savoring the time with family. Burrowing into books old and new. Writing purely for pleasure. 

The pull of the new academic year is a bit like the tide, swelling and ebbing on an immutable schedule. Today at 1:09 pm the tide will peak. On Wednesday, September 6th at 1:10 pm, I will stand up and welcome a physical chemistry class bursting at the seams. Resistance is futile.

Re-created

I am recreating. I am down at the New Jersey shore, ocean breezes blowing through the door, the susurration of the surf punctuated by the shrill shrieks of sea gulls excited by the potential snacks being toted onto the beach to keep toddlers (and teens and twenty-something offspring and their parents) from getting peckish. 

I have read six books, walked miles each day unplugged from books or podcasts or the news, floated in the sea, eaten ice cream, laughed with my kids until the tears ran down my face, lingered over dinner at an outdoor cafe. Soaked in grace until the creakiness of the summer’s push to finish the book (and several other projects) eases. Reminded that at my core I am a human being, and not a human do-er.  I feel re-created.

Classes begin in just over two weeks, the start of my 39th year as a college professor, my 61st “first day of school”. I always imagine the entry to the new school year will be gentle, the air faintly crisp at the end of the day. And always somehow surprised when it is comes in hot, afterburners roaring. All the more reason to dump as much heat as I can this week.

Dr. Francl's home for lonely poinsettas

 

The email came from a student in my first year writing class. Could I give a temporary home, she wondered, to her poinsettia over winter break? After a brief exchange concerning cats and watering requirements we agreed that I could house her poinsettia. She would drop it off, she said, on the last day of final exams. "Perfect! I'll be on the lookout for it.”

Friday came, and the poinsettia arrived with a note. I took it into my office and put it on my desk and returned to grading quantum mechanics finals. I stepped out for a minute to heat up a cup of tea and when I returned there were two poinsettias outside of my office. I was puzzled for a moment. I was sure I had brought the poinsettia in. Had I imagined it? I picked them up and carried them inside and indeed there was already a poinsettia my desk. Whew!

Still I wondered, why the plenitude of poinsettias? And one looked a little bit the worse for wear. Was it the ghost of poinsettias future? 

An email resolved the mystery, upon hearing that I was giving a home to one poinsettia, friends of my student thought I might give a home to their poinsettias as well. So I find myself a plant parent for break. They do brighten my office. And I feel honored that someone thinks I might be able to restore the sad poinsettia to health (though I fear it may need more of an Easter event). I will do my best to channel my mother who was not only an amazing parent to six kids but also a terrific plant parent as well.

Making a meringue of things

The end of summer can be a seismic shift for me. I go from days with nothing at all on the calendar to days that are end to end meetings and classes. There is no happy medium. It can be chaotic, and it always takes me a bit of time to find my rhythm.

This year it feels a bit like making meringue, as I gently try to fold my summer schedule into the coming academic year. When you fold egg whites into a batter you need to be gentle, and slow. Use too much force, beat them too fast, and the whole project utterly collapses. These are good lessons for life as well. Be gentle. Don't rush. Let the lightness balance out the moments that feel overwhelming and heavy. Sometimes it's enough to get things basically combined, but if one tries too hard for perfect uniformity, one can lose some of the spaces to breathe.

I have a heavy teaching semester coming, with three courses, including a writing intensive one with extra conferences for students. I'm still working on the tea book. I have a couple of other writing projects with deadlines staring me in the face. But I'm trying to keep some of summer's pockets of air folded in. Riding my bike back and forth to the college. Making time for prayer first thing in the morning. Taking a moment to catch up with the student or colleague I haven't seen since last spring. I may not be perfectly organized for the start of the new semester, but the goal is to let the  summer leaven the year, and to avoid collapsing the whole cake.

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Now of course I'm craving an angel food cake, and maybe will give that a fly on the weekend. Or maybe a sponge cake with fruit?

Where do exams come from?

Where do exams come from? I had a student stop by last week to see about finding a time to ask some research questions. When I said that I was busy this week getting ready for final exams the student seemed confused. "But exams haven't started yet?"

"True," I replied, "they do not start for students for more than a week, but I need to have the exams written well before that." At Bryn Mawr students may take what we call self-scheduled exams, where they pick an exam up from the registrar's office in an envelope, take it to a space designated for exams to complete and return it to the registrar's office. This means my exams must be written and copied well before students start to take them. And writing an exam, a good one anyway, takes time.

It made me wonder where students think exams come from. I often hear students say about a question on exam, "what were they asking?" As if there is some mysterious "they" that writes the questions not me.

 

The Long Retreat

R2Me2, my trusty microphone, and my tea cup

We are not quite sheltered in place. The college has closed, we've pivoted to remote coursework. I'm working hard to create a situation for my students that lets them keep learning in all the different situations they are finding themselves. My students are scattered across several continents, some home, some not, some in quarantine.

I got up this morning, showered, pulled on my jeans, grabbed a white turtleneck from the stack on the shelf, and tossed a sweater over it all. I flashed back to the 30 days I spent in silence making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, where each day I got up and showered, put on jeans and a white turtleneck and one of the two sweaters I'd brought. I made tea and prayed morning prayer. I went for a walk everyday. I didn't go into town or shop or read the news. I spent intense hours in prayer, then time processing it, in writing and with my spiritual director. All of us praying through those days joined together for the Eucharist each evening before dinner.

Now I'm getting up and making tea and praying morning prayer. I go for a walk everyday. I haven't gone grocery shopping or into the college. OK, I have read the news, but most of the day I've been so focussed on the things I need to do to make this work for my students that I haven't given the news a thought. I'm spending intense hours in class preparation, then in processing it so I can pack it up for my students. The rest of the house is equally focussed. And every night, I sit down to a meal with Math Man and Crash. I can feel my retreat habits kick in, attuned to the day's ebb and flow, holding a tight focus on the work at hand.

This retreat from daily life may be longer than 30 days, but I trust the graces of those 30 days in silence will spill over these more difficult days.

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Crash is home with us because the play he was working shuttered after one night and his apartment is sublet, since he was expecting to be elsewhere. If ever there was a moment to have a live in stage manager, this migh

Release the penguins! A score for the start of classes

I am in my last year as chair of the chemistry department, I'm also chairing a major committee for the college. The last three weeks have been...packed? I ran across this music meme again last week and realized it's the perfect score to accompany the start of the semester for a department chair (or faculty member, or support staff, or student, or parent...the slope of the ramp from summer to fall is steep for us all!).

When the day gets chaotic (and they all have), I visualize the score, and find my spot on it. Before school began its advice to "keep both feet together" and to "cool the timpani with a small fan" reminded me to plant my feet, stand my ground and attend to self-care and care for my students and faculty. Of course, nothing goes as planned, as the "light explosives now....and.....now" portended.  But now the saxes have moved downstage (where hopefully they will calm down. Honestly, I didn't mean to double book their rehearsal room and I'm so sorry the piccolos drove them out with that shrill arpeggio. If your hearing doesn't return soon, do let me know.)

"Play ball!" and the first day of classes was upon us, even though I still needed a relief pitcher for Thursday afternoon organic lab, and yes, a tempo of 788 beats per minutes seems about how we usually play this section, why do you ask?  Of course, two measures later you can certainly understand why I've "gradually become agitated"given that metronome setting.

But here we are, at the end of the second week, and I'm relieved to say I've reached the measure where I'm instructed to "release the penguins." Watch out, they've gotten quite grumpy cooped up in my office these last two weeks, but once on the loose, not my problem any more.

Letters to and from the past

A section of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wikimedia.

I taught a Balch seminar (a required first year course for all Bryn Mawr students) last fall. Emily Balch was a Bryn Mawr alumna, a graduate of the college's first class in 1889, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work at The Hague on forging peace in the wake of WWI and through the first half of the 20th century.  She was a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and contributed to the development of international disarmament policy. She had been a faculty member at Wellesley for more than 20 years, but when she asked for an extension of a leave of absence from Wellesley to continue the work she was doing, the board fired her.

We began each class with a short writing prompt, one of the last ones was "Write a letter to one of your great-great grandmothers."  I knew one of my great-grandmothers, Mary Bach Chapp, but not any of my great-great grandmothers.  And I know only one story about any of them, one from my mother who heard it from her grandmother. It's the story of a woman living in 19th century Wales who each night traced a blessing over the banked embers of the fireplace, to be sure a fire could be roused in the morning. Her life and mine, separated by a century, what would I tell her? What would she want to know? What would I want to know about her and her life? What if we could write to each other?

I've been writing about Isaiah, who had things to say to the Israelites in that present moment, but who also has something to say to the far distant future. For what is Scripture, but letters to the future from people who cherished God so much they could not help but let themselves be opened to the Eternal and write and sing of such love for generations living in a future they could not imagine.

A page from the Book of Imaginary Beings

Not a chronophage, but a beetle of unknown

provenance. Still, this is how I imagine them.

My office is infested with chronophages. Creatures that gnaw at my calendar, leaving it, and me, a shell.  It's rather like the mouse that found the remains of the Halloween candy I had stored on the shelf in my office, and ate the one remaining Milky Way bar, leaving behind (a) all the Skittles and (b) a nearly intact wrapper.  I hadn't even realized it was empty until I picked it up. (And what does this tell me about Skittles, if even the mouse eschews them?)

The surest sign of this infestation is that while my to-do list and appointments list grow exponentially longer, time remains unrelentingly inelastic.

I'm quite sure the phages got in through my email. Every time I opened it up, there were more requests for my time. Which will take me some time to find some time for, eating time long before they land on the calendar.  They slip between pages of papers on my desk.  I'm sure I saw one fall out when I picked up that folder of problem sets to grade. Once loose in my office, they rapidly spread to the phone, laying eggs in my voice mail.  A few lurk just outside my door, hitching a ride on my teaching bag should I be so careless as to set it down.

I fear that I might have transported them home, as I scoured the calendar for a 2-hour block to go grocery shopping for the impending holiday.  Not here, dishwasher being delivered — maybe. Not there, evening event.

The plague of chronophages is insidious. None of the requests in my email, or knocks at my door are unreasonable, nor is anyone asking who I would not wish to accommodate.  As they say about traffic on the radio, the problem is volume. Sheer volume.

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I've been reading Caspar Hendersen's "The Book of Barely Imagined Beings" -- a modern bestiary, which lends itself to dipping in and out, and will wait patiently until I can return to its pages. Which led to my seeing these barely there imaginary beings in the corners of my office. For the in-class writing exercise last Thursday, I asked my students to describe one of their internal writing companions: the Editor, the Distractor, the Coach, the Cheerleader and the Taskbeing. It makes me wonder who I should queue up to deal with the phages?  Could I send the Distractor? Would it be like matter and antimatter?

A flood of memories

The flood of 2018. Park Science Center. The lowest point in the 

chemistry wing was under 8" of water.

I have taught at least one class in this room almost every year for the last 32 years.  I gave my job interview talk in this space, albeit in a less modern incarnation.

I stood at a standard demonstration table, complete with sink and running water. I used an overhead projector much like the one on the cart in the corner, putting my used transparencies to the side as I worked through my talk (what work did I talk about?  no idea!).

Midway through my talk I heard the sound of water running into the sink.  I looked over to see that I had knocked over the cup of hot chocolate I was drinking in the hopes of defrosting after a walk across campus in a sudden snowstorm for which I was woefully unprepared. All over my stacked of completed transparencies.

I thought at that moment I might have lost any chance at the job.  I'd spent all day reassuring experimentalists that the reason I was a theorist was not "bad hands" — in other words that I wasn't clumsy in the lab. Thankfully everything was draining in the sink and that no one asked to see any of the wet, sticky sheets that had been my carefully prepared talk.

The water has receded, but not the flood of memories it unleashed.

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Well before the flood, I wrote a piece for Nature Chemistry which features a brief tale of this classroom: "Talking to Pauling's Ghost"

Syllabi, world creation and via ferrata

Via ferrata in Austria
By Luidger - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I'm spending my days layering class prep over the final work on a book manuscript due to the publisher in about a month.

Writing today felt a bit like I was climbing up this cliff. Strapped onto a cable, exposed to the elements and grabbing for any handhold I could.  (Thanks, Flannery O'Connor for the lift midafternoon and to Crash who read a texted version of a couple of paragraphs on his phone between planes).

These fixed climbing routes are called a via ferrata - an "iron road" in Italian.  In some ways my intro chemistry class is a via ferrata, a way to climb through some tough material using fixed points I've constructed. It's a collaboration between the climbers and the creator of the route, and work is required on both parts.  (I have climbed a couple of easy routes this way - in Acadia and in New Mexico - the views were great, but I was pretty terrified the whole way, which hopefully my students will not be.)

I also read somewhere, by someone, a great essay about syllabi as a genre, specifically "world creation" genre.  I wish I could find it again.

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Book report:  100% drafted; 77% in reasonable draft; 43% in near final draft; 23% in rather drafty draft.  This week's goal - to get those pieces in drafty draft well on their way to final draft.

And if you're wondering how I stumbled onto the term via ferrata -it's how you get to this hotel.  Warning, the photos are not for the height averse. 

Advice to students: write

Crash with large diploma.  In Latin.

I have them for four academic years, sometimes for just one class, sometimes for three or four or a year of research.  I teach them to think like a chemist, to wield the tools of quantum chemistry with confidence and, I hope, a bit of panache.  I turn around twice and they are coming to my office, not to ask about the problem set, or to plan their courses, but to start adulting (as the subject line of so many Crash emails styled it.)

I want to go to graduate school. What do I do next? I’ve got an interview next week, what should I say about my research?  Advice goes back and forth.  What advice, I ask them, should I give to next year’s students about this course, what did they wish they had known before they began?

Turn around once more and they are walking across the grass and up the hill into adulthood.

Some of my students will be itinerant scholars, moving from place to place after a few weeks, month or perhaps a year. Write, I tell them, every week or more.

Start a blog, open up a document in your favorite text editor, by hand in a journal.  It doesn’t matter where the words go, just that they go.

Address your narrative to someone, so you remember to unpack the interior movements, so your words are not amorphous, but take on a shape. Write for your parents, your friends, your future self, your nieces and nephews, sons and daughters yet to be born.

Don't worry about length.  Five words, five hundred. Don't worry about capturing it all.  You can't. Write about the little things as often as the big ones.

Write often.  You'll never write as often as you think, but write when you think of it.  Don't wait for the perfect time.

I think I should have been giving this advice to all my students. Write, no matter if you are on the road, or planted for four years in a doctoral program, or starting a working life. Write often, write with purpose, catch the details when they are fresh.  You will not, I think, ever regret having this door to these days of your life.

And in the end?  Archive it, of course.  Scan it, if you wrote by hand.  Print it out if you did not.  On acid free paper. Either way, put it on the shelf, with a few photos and other ephemera.

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It's never too late to start, so even if you are not newly graduated, write! I'm off to take my own advice, traveling to Rome, I'll write. Often.

Confessions

Confessions:

I ate the cheesecake.
I left my notes at home.
It was not the dog's fault.
I don't know everything.
I need a sign from God sometimes,
just the tiniest little sign.
Just one word,
or a splash of water,
a piece of bread, broken
and multiplied.
Multiplied!
I need to see just a small piece
of forgiveness,
a little resurrection.
Just one word
Multiplied.
I don't know everything.
It was not the dog's fault.
I left my notes at home.
I ate the cheesecake.
Forgive me.

Rev. Diane Roth

I didn't leave my notes home today.  But I seem to have misplaced my patience.  It is most definitely not the cat's fault, and I want to tell the students swarming my office that I don't know everything, and that sometimes I lose the threads that are holding together three classes, an exam, four different problem sets and all the majors who want to know what to take, when and who they will be when they emerge from this place.  Which problem 3 are you asking about again?

I needed a sign, a tiny sign, that God has not left me alone to hold up this corner of the world.  So I looked out my window, to see the topmost branches of the fifty foot tall tree stirring in the breeze against an ice blue sky edged with pink.  A sign.  Nothing substantial, nothing that I might cling to, just a passing touch, like the ones exchanged by long time lovers.

I don't know everything. "Forgive me," I say to the last student, "my patience is exhausted."

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"Confessions:"  © Diane Roth. Used with permission.