I awoke this morning to find a sparse ground fog irradiated by the light of a nearly full moon hanging in a cloudless, late February sky. The fog is just dense enough to make a mystery of the fields beyond the pines, and suffused with just enough moonlight to highlight every branch and twig of the pines, leaving privacy only to their needles.
A morning composed from the stuff of dreams.
I spent yesterday in two meetings on the campus of the University of Washington where I graduated sometime during the last millennium. The purpose of the first was to share with a University employee my memories of a program in which I was involved during the time of its campus infancy, a period for which those that presently administer the program have only a few records residing on hand-written, three-by-five cards filed in dusty filing cabinets somewhere in the basement of whatever building in which they are housed; the purpose of the second was to coach two bright, vibrant, impossibly young law students in preparation for the face-to-face negotiations they will undertake this coming Friday in Denver as a part of an inter-law school transactional competition in which they are presently engaged.
It was a day of memory and experience sandwiched between now and then, sandwiched between the induced recollections of the initial stirrings of intellectualism and the first tastes of freedom enjoyed by anyone attending college for the first time far from the safety of the home in which they were raised, and the present tense of a long life baked from an idiosyncratic, but not unusual, mixture of successes and failures measured out in cups, teaspoons, and dollops of personal experience, well spiced with serendipity, both bitter and sweet, and the tang of choices long since made.
Two images stand out from the day: Sitting in a waiting room talking to my luncheon companion, only to look up to see a friend with whom I graduated from the University walking in front of me and the warm handshake and brief conversation which followed; one of the two young women whom I am coaching running out the front door of the law school at full speed in a desperate attempt to reach a class in another building for which she was already late.
Memories splayed against the surreal landscape of morning.
