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Thank you Fred--first thought in over a month. It must be the influence of Thomas Kinkade. Transfer Student Kinkade art is sweet and cloying, a faint but cheap scent. It evokes memories of Keane children with death camp survivor eyes. The campus bookstore does a brisk trade in Tim LaHaye novels that promise eternity: a lake of burning horror for the unsaved, but bliss to those with paid-up tithes and mortgages, recession-proof jobs and carry permits. So I teach, or try, the children of these civil servants, tradesmen, whoever they send me, and feel a bit like the Civil War battlefield surgeon who cannot be choosy or (in spite of all) judgmental. For their children are sweet, naive of soul if not of body: jocks, cheerleaders, body-pierced and tattoo'd artists, profane and beautiful as a Manet picnic, all bemused by what to make of me, who is not one of them, yet still surprises: too old to be attractive but able to speak a disarming shared earthiness and knowledge of a world beyond what my age is supposed to be. Sadness clouds the cafeteria we all share, the rumor mill where true learning happens. So overhear that some of the girls are easy marks who fight the thought of being pegged since high school as The Low-Priced Spread by clinging to the forgiving touch of Jesus the Christ and his emissary on earth, the boyfriend who pulls out in time. This explains the boyfriend, spent and hung-over, who falls asleep in class, mindless of the insult, and goes from one conquest to the next until, like Bristol Palin's boyfriend, he thinks he's hit PAY DIRT because her daddy's rich, her mamma's good-looking, and he can get a gig driving a Ditch Witch. But "his" girl in the first row, who crossed her legs to get (and got) my attention, too, transfers to Stockton at term's end, sends me (of all people) an ambiguous Facebook note, then disappears from campus, proving character sometimes is born from the curdled seed of a boy who will remain so. She proves that there is no generic American Dream, only the private hope that must be wrenched from the steel fangs of the god called Retribution. KW/12-31-08 -- Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html --------------------------------- "All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray