Welcome Mail

A re-purposed envelope with my name on it (in real, blue-ink handwriting) arrived on my desk over the lunch hour and in it a saving grace, maybe.

Recently retired Coker College geology professor Fred Edinger sent me a to-do list worth keeping and worth completing.  Actually, there were three lists in the envelope -- all of them wonderful -- but I intend to complete the smallest list first.  He sent me a copy of the two-sided handout he distributed at his Last Lecture, which he titled "Outside of a Dog" and delivered to the public on April 11, 2012.  His talk profiled ten books he especially likes. Each, he says, taught him something he valued.

With most of the summer ahead of me, I'm ready to start reading, and I hope others will join me.


Don Quijote, by Miguel de Cervantes (Raffel translation)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley
Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris
Wolf Willow, by Wallace Stegner
Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer
The Testament, by John Grisham
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

The other lists, by the way, in case anyone wants me to send them along, were summer reading lists compiled from suggestions of Coker's faculty and staff by Melinda Deyasi in 2004 and by Fred Edinger last fall.

Dark is Done

It sounded lovely to me from the start.  Her voice was upbeat and poised.  The information was helpful. The language, concise and direct. But when the server at the Midnight Rooster and Eatery, whose name I'm sad not to know, said, "Dark is done," her coworker laughed and waved her arm dramatically.

"Dark is done!" a romantic novel? a poem? a work of art?

The two sweet women cheered each other and me with playful ambition.  The phrase grew quickly, from an assessment of the coffee's elapsed brewing time to an affectionate expression of limitless promise.

Dark is done.  ...faith, hope and love... the greatest of these is love.

Learning by example

I spent the past seven days with a friend in Carolina Pines Regional Hosptial and later in the Rehab Center at Morell, and I came face to face with a side of doctoring I rarely consider.

Any who know me can attest that I don't commonly have much nice to say about the country's health care system.  Today I'm embarrassed by my narrowness.  From where I sat this week, my neighbors looked for all the world like a band of disciples making straight the way of the Lord.    One person after another, dozens of them -- visitors, nurses, nurses aids, doctors -- brought authentic empathy and service to friends and strangers.  Some worked with humor, others with stories. Some used physical strength and some brought expertise. They used natural and painstakingly acquired gifts to relieve suffering, restore hope and hurry healing.   It was an honor to observe.

Commencement 2012

Bill Schmidt, a friend whom I've known for a decade, did more for us today than visit Coker College.  He smiled and taught and warmly encouraged us to thoughtfully persist.  And, I am thoroughly grateful.

That he is a ranking editor at the world's finest newspaper backed his encouragment with a personal confidence that pursuing excellence is not only good and possible, it matters.  A couple of excerpts from his remarks that I hope to hold dearly for a long, long time are these: 

"The old rules that framed our expectations have been shaken, forcing a re-evaluation of our place and relevance... 

"So it is in times like these that you need people -- serious institutions, real journalists -- who can bear witness and add context and differentiate what is real from what is not, and -- importantly -- to tell our stories -- and the stories of others -- with real understanding and empathy. ..."