Wherein I go to England, am called Doctor.

This morning I'd finally had it.

Dear Prestigious Institution, I wrote. Shall I come, or would you rather I stayed home? If you don't know now, will you know soon? Sincerely, Dr. S.

Nine minutes later--I kid you not: nine--Thunderbird made its hollow thunk of a new e-mail alert sound. Dear Dr. S, the new message read. Attached please find your election letter from our college president. The original is in the mail. By the way, what do you specialize in, in twelve words or less? [I kid you not: twelve.] We keep a list of fellows and their specialties. Sincerely, Prestigious Institution.

Now they have my twelve words. Soon they will have (almost) all of me. Fortunately for the part of me that gets homesick, much of England looks like the parts of Ohio I love best. Plus there are trains that take you places. Like London. And the ocean. And the airport where there are planes to Greece.

That's right, gang: in September, we're going international.

A late wind.

Tonight I look into my shoulderbag of books and papers as though its mouth is a gaping maw with a mind of its own. I turn away. A tiny insect circles the dining room lamp. When it no longer thinks I'm paying attention, it will become my shoulderbag again, and I will go back to work.

Tonight I have been thinking of the year we made kites, the year the store-bought nylon one got away from us in the park and lodged in the trees. I started calling back kites on my walk home from the store with a bag of garbage bags; I pulled one out early just to hear it flap in the wind. The wind caught it, made it a lonely girl's sail on a landlocked street. I remembered the plywood frame, the black and neon paints, the strange propeller and enormous rubberbands that should have sent the kite flying until a breeze could catch it. But didn't. (I did not remember the dual-propeller airplane kite given to me the day of my dissertation defense, the one that never flew, the one I disassembled when its giver left town, the one that still lives in my trunk four years later. Though it must be said that I am remembering it now.) (Who flies a kite at night? If I knew a man with a stock of luminescent pastes, I would ring him up and we could find a field of new grass, fingerpaint that kite, and set it alight.)

Tonight that flapping bag lofted me all the way home.

(Look: the shoulderbag is dozing off, falling back to being just itself. Nothing to fear now: pull out a book: get back to it.)

Some notes on sitting together.

"Are you two in love?" says the six-year-old boy who's nose-high to our booth. The soon-to-graduate student and I laugh out loud. "No," I say, calling the boy by name. "Then why are you sitting together?" he retorts.

Suddenly, it's a conversation that's picked up speed. We are working the logic of children. And this child is a quick one.

Both our bodies bear his handiwork this afternoon, for instance. When I arrived outside the coffeeshop to meet my former student for lunch, he held out his left hand, the back of which bore a green markered flower. "Like my tattoo?" he said. "Where'd that come from?" I replied. He gestured toward the village's six-year-old friend, son of the coffeeshop's owners, where he stood nearby wielding a green marker. This child and his family live around the corner from me. Two falls ago, he and I waded through my raked leaves, back and forth across the front of my yard; last week, he and his brother tackled me repeatedly on the coffeeshop's couch, and he tried to bite my new Superhero necklace, a move which garnered him a mighty and merciless tickling. This child is, in short, one of the best fixtures in my village life.

When he saw me admiring my student's flower tattoo, the child asked whether I wanted one, as well. I assented. "Where do you want it?" he asked. I held out both hands. "Do you want to put it on the hand with the silver ring or the hand wtih the iron ring?" I replied. He paused, then reached for my right arm. The weather was just cool enough today for me to be wearing bracelet-length sleeves, leaving my forearms exposed. That expanse of skin was just the canvas he needed. Taking my right wrist in his left hand, he made a first stroke, putting a point--the tip of an arrow, perhaps?--near the bottom of my sleeve. I pushed my sleeve up, but he pulled it back down: "I'm not going to put anything up there." "I'm just keeping my sleeve out of your way," I said. He proceeded with total, confident absorption. Soon a tall building with a ground-floor door was taking shape. "Is it a house?" I said. "No." "Is it an apartment building?" "No." I guessed as many more tall buildings as I could imagine. As he drew horizontal lines down the front of the pointy-topped structure on my forearm, someone made him laugh and left a bobble partway down.

"Do you know what it is?" he said. "No," I answered.

"It's a lighthouse."

One of my students from the first women's writing course I taught here showed up just then. I showed her my forearm and its six-inch green tattoo. "He has had his vision," I told her. My other student and I went in to order lunch.

And now, ten mintues later, my own personal tattoo artist wants to know whether the boy who wears his flower and the girl who wears his lighthouse are in love.

"We might be in love," I tell him, "but we're not in love with each other."

"I think that you are in love!" he crows.

His mother appears behind me. "He thinks that we're in love because we're sitting together," I say, looking over my shoulder at her; my student is laughing so hard that he can't say anything at all.

She laughs and looks down at her son. "What about you and E.?" she asks him. "You sit together. Are you in love?"

Suddenly things start coming clear: he turns redder and redder; my student regains his voice and says, "Look at that color! Look at him blushing!"; I chime in to say, "Are you in love??" He blushes and blushes and laughs and calls out, "Whatever!" and is ushered away by his laughing mother.

It's one of the day's high points.

For the rest of the day, a six-inch green lighthouse beacons up my arm. It has never occurred to me to get a tattoo on the outside of my forearm, but I find myself enjoying this one's presence immensely. When the time comes, all the green marker sloughs easily off, all but the dark rectangle of the lighthouse's door, which holds fast in the skin stretched over my wristbone.

* * *

It's not the first time this month that someone has spoken to me about love in a coffee shop. I mentioned Granville Jim last week. A couple of days into May, I drove to Granville, a town about 30 minutes away, to run a discussion on Austen's Emma. All my duties over by 9 a.m., I decided to stop into the village's coffee shop for a coffee and some reading. By 9:15, I had noticed the old man at the table one over and one up from me; it was hard not to notice him because he was staring. I smiled and went back to reading. When I glanced up, he was still staring. I smiled again. A few minutes later, he called over to me, "I hope you get an A in that class!" I laughed and told him that I was teaching that class, and he took the opportunity to ask whether he could join me.

"I'm blind," he explained as he sat down, "and so I have to get really close to a girl to see whether she's pretty." As the conversation moved ahead, it didn't take him long to proclaim me not only pretty but also gorgeous--because of my smarts. (I think it was my getting his joke about the radio announcer who mispronounced "Prokoviev" as "Prokofeef" that did it. "Do you know who Prokofeef is?" he asked. "Sure," I said. "Who was he?" "A Russian composer." "Right! But it wasn't pronounced Prokofeef," he replied. "But I can't teach you anything; you're outsmarting me already!") "Do you know what makes a girl gorgeous?" he asked. "What's that?" I said. "Being smart. Having brains."

Jim and I talked for a good ninety minutes. I stayed around so long, in part, because so many of the stories he told were of his killingly unhappy marriage--and because I could imagine (having just taught a class on Austen, after all) that his wife would have her own lacerating tales to tell. By the time we parted, I knew the makes of all four of his children's cars and where they all live. I knew about his imminent relocation to Granville's retirement community, and his college days, and the time he was supposed to meet up with the woman who might have been the love of his life but then didn't talk to her because she was talking to another guy on the street corner where they were supposed to meet. I knew that he didn't like "this rock and roll music." I knew that he thought any young woman should avoid having a boyfriend with long hair and an earring: "I tell you, look out. He's gender confused." I will admit that he got some points from me for having used the phrase "gender confused."

"What's your maiden name?" he asked me at one point. "Oh, I'm not married," I told him. I don't quite remember how the conversation went from there--nowhere where he had to understand my singular life, though, since he remained convinced to the end that I had a boyfriend somewhere. (He was sure that I am not "gender confused.") Perhaps he offered yet another iteration of his warning against hasty marriage. "Getting married to my wife was the biggest mistake of my life," he told me several times, at one point claiming that he should have had the marriage annulled after three weeks.

Toward the end of our encounter, Jim clarified for himself that I am a teacher. "I would never have thought that I'd fall in love with a teacher," he said. I laughed. In fact, I deliberately let my laugh run its fullest octave. By that point, it had long been clear to me that I was some moment of joy dropped into this sad-seeming stranger's morning. What harm was there in letting it go on? It was difficult to extricate myself, anyhow; ultimately, I had to use the out he offered me when he suggested that my boyfriend was undoubtedly waiting for me to return. "I do actually have to go," I replied. He grasped my right hand in his and held my right wrist in his left hand. "You've made my day," he said.

Had my young friend seen it--this eighty-year-old hand enveloping the wrist and forearm that would come to bear a beacon, on the body of a thirty-one-year-old woman no one else has called gorgeous in years--he would have thought he was looking at love.

Pretty Mama.

[I'm so silly that it took me twelve hours to figure out the right title for a mother's day post. Reportedly, my first word was "Boort," an infantization of "Bart," our wire-haired fox terrier. But my second and third words were "Pretty Mama." For good reason. No picture I have could show you how beautiful my mother is. She is a tongue of flame, a red-headed streak of wonder. She is the elucidation of my life. She's pretty like this--and then some.]

I'm trying to think of my favorite story about my mother, but I keep coming back to some basic facts. When I go to visit her, she's always glad to see me. When I hug her, she's always happy to hold me for a long time. And when it's time for me to leave for my own home, a big part of me always wants to stay with her. She is the best of mothers. I love a lot of others' mothers. But I have never once wanted to trade my mother for any of those other mothers. I love my mother, but I'm glad to say that I like her immensely, too, and I'm so glad she likes me back.

All of which is to say, happy mother's day, Mama. I love you.

[My mother is nothing if not a pillar of truth. She has written to let me know that those basic facts I keep coming back to are not facts at all--alas!

I have to tell you that your memory is not totally accurate--although it's a much better read emotionally than the actual facts. "Boort" was your first word followed rapidly by "ogoo" (yogurt), "ookie" (cookie), "Papa," and "Pat, pat, pat" (pat a cake). After we moved to New York you came out with "Pretty Mama." You were almost fourteen months old. Of course, your wonderful father taught you that. You said, "Pretty baby," when we looked into a mirror a few months before then. I taught you that. Aren't we a pretty pair?

All due to you!]

Newness.

I have a new space, an auxiliary to and detour from my usual round. It is piped for water and wired for power but nothing else: no phone, no cable, no web. I am, as a friend once put it, not cellular. And thus this new space is an almost total disconnect. (Ironically, then, it's the first of all my spaces of which I've shown you a picture--perhaps because my plan is to keep it entirely to myself in all other ways.) (And no, those arms don't belong to me. If only!)

There is something crucial about a desk at a window: what I want is not just a room of my own but a window of my own. The year I lived in England, a friend and I would race each other each day to claim the two popped-out window seats in our university's Old Library. At those desks, one sat with one's back to the library's stacks and tables. The desks themselves sat in floor-to-ceiling windowed alcoves, with windows on three sides, so that we could actually spy on each other while we did our work, there in our protrusions from the building. On the clearest days, I could see all the way to the estuary that led down to and up from the sea.

This new space does not have such a protrusion, and there's no water to see, but it does have an immense amount of room for me to perch at a small desk beside any of four large windows--and the view is arguably better than the last time I took up residence behind a desk facing out a window, the summer I spent two weeks in Lancaster, England and rearranged my whole room's furniture so as to create a window desk. (That July, I looked out at a postwar dormitory complex.) Moreover, I am sharing the space with the fabulous woman who has helped me see--just for instance--the similarities among these shapes:

When she invited me to share the space, she promised that sometimes it feels like New York City--a selling point she didn't really need. But what struck me when I went in this afternoon is how much it feels like southern Indiana up there (because you know that I wouldn't have said yes to sharing a first-floor space). Southern Indiana is where I first encountered tin ceilings and weird dilapidations, the strangeness of nineteenth-century architectural detail atop the most gravely banal of everyday endeavors. And the little town above which I will now perch is not entirely unlike the little town that was my introduction to the Hoosier state. And really, that makes it just enough different from my home village. Just enough different to jostle me toward what I'm after.

When I walked out two nights ago--the night I saw the luciérnagas in the ravine--I could feel the village brewing, the season changing over from order to ferment. I had forgotten what this blooming feels like; somehow, it got lost in the press of the autumn and winter. It's about time for something to get made, or born: I can feel it coming. Now I just need to show up and greet it.

I'm not asking for much from this new space. I'm asking for everything. Enough of halfways and almosts.

Rooting.

There are some things I want to do tomorrow. Such as. Acquire tiny jade plants, little sprigs of green, and plant them in small brightly colored pots. Arrange them on a windowsill. Arrange them on a particular set of windowsills in a space I have not yet occupied. Water them gently but surely and arrange them with my Lake Ontario stones, my poet-colleague-given shells, the ones that reminded her of me because they are all insides and outsides all at once. Put my glass frog into the mix.

Make my life over in the fashion of people whose thoughts manifest themselves in words on paper, not just in more thoughts.

Put a red flower in a clear vase and write by its emanation until I need to get up and take a walk.

Sit still in sunlight until I've filled pages and pages.

Lie to sleep early in the mid-spring nightcool.

Shards, scraps, sounds.

Piecemeal: a meal in components, in contributions, beans and salads in pots, burgers and dogs in buns. All the assembled stuffs, all my assembled people. And after dinner, after porch-sitting, after the packing up and sending everyone home, a first walk out into the near-dark with only a sleeveless dress on: the walking low and long, hard to the ground at my heels, frogs whirbling in the woods.

Then a blink, a prick of greeny yellow, another, another. Enough to stop me cold at the side of the road to be sure I was actually seeing what I was seeing: the summer's second sky, not-stars flicking again again again in the trees: the year's first fireflies, so soon.

Scrapes, scratches, cries.

Not far from the art barn, a wire angel has been hanging for days, suspended between two trees. The first two times I saw her, I didn't have my camera. This afternoon I went back and looked at her some more. It's a startling piece, vaguely sinister but also startlingly lovely, angry, forbidding, helpless. Harsh. She's an angel who would grate rather than gentle. She's cold and removed but also so fully human a figure. She's alighting or removing herself--one hand reaches to clutch; the other withdraws, falls away.

One foot is out for landing or for pushing off. The other curls behind, pointless for the time being.

It's the hair that hits me hardest, that somehow says to me: this is a vulnerability. This is how we are now, how we do now. This is what it will be like when we pay.

Not even I know fully what I mean.

Pause.

So many days begin promisingly and then tank in the least expected ways. This morning there was milky espresso and toast and jam. And there were deer in the yard. (Can you see them both? One is a bit tricky. Click on the picture to see )

You may recall that I had reclining deer in the yard last May, as well. I love the idea of their using my yard for siesta.

And then things were fine for awhile, and then they were quite lovely, and then they were simply noisy and confused. I did what I could, said things I needed to say, read more of the Brownings' love letters, cooked dinner for someone beside myself for a change, patted a dog, talked to my excellent mother. Read some poems on the stairwell of poetry at the officehouse (we covered a stairwell in poetry during April, National Poetry Month). Came home again in the dark with my computer and my stack of photographs.

Tomorrow, I will start again. Some days are like this, and at least it wasn't raining.

In the art barn, all the rooms have gone silent and clean, all the young artmakers vanishing for the summer. I sat in the empty and shining photo lab, in the evening sun, waiting for the mounting press to heat up. I thought about missing that space. I thought about being missed. I went back to my reading.

The uncountable night.

With nearly forty mounted photographs stacked neatly in the backseat, I drove to the grocery store in the middle of the night. A deer stood still at the side of the road and flashed its eyes my way, then let me pass unscathed. I saw three other cars before I pulled into a parking lot holding six.

At night the grocery store is a sleeping linoleum palace. At night there are foodstuffs, canisters, crates of bottles stacked everywhere, leaving tiny narrow aisles. At night there are few women in the store.

Back in my car, with the photographs still neatly stacked in the backseat, and with Italian bread, a quart of milk, and some yogurt riding shotgun, I drove home again over the cresting hills. Turning back onto the state highway, I suddenly had a good long look at the sky, at all its stars, at all its small-making sweep. Its severalness. I thought about counting them, as I drove past the sheep pasture that now feeds llamas as well, as I coasted back to Gambier past another deer on the other side of the road.

Something about a photograph spotted, mounted, and signed makes it look more serious. I took this time, it says. I measured and marked and pulled the arm on the mounting press down, and I made sure that every edge stuck. And I have to say: I'm pretty pleased with this semester's fruit. The images play nice with one another. Part of me wants to figure out a way to hang them all over my life.

Tomorrow I reemerge from my photolab cocoon. Tomorrow my nose goes back to my words.

I can't show you, I can't show you.

I spent something like ten hours standing on the darkroom's concrete floors, striding back and forth from enlarger to developer, stop, and fix trays, then out to the light, then back to the photo wash, then back to the enlarger. The long repetition of a tight round, and now my legs are sore.

For part of the day, I had one of my students with me, observing the printing process (frequently offering aesthetic advice, occasionally taking part in the printing). Again and again we watched shards of Ohio and Kentucky swim out of the papers' chemical coatings: water beading on grass here, the long shadow of a fire escape there, the dead droop of a freeze-shocked magnolia branch here, the short sweep of the burnt prairie there.

Later, on my own, I felt my stack of blank paper shrinking and started printing the things I'd like to take with me if I leave the country in the fall. What will put home on my walls? What will take the place of walking the prairie in the evenings next spring? And so I have printed half a barn, the curl of field grass, the silhouette of thorns. And so I have what might look like weeds, like decay, like desolation. And so I have my county. But they are all on paper, not on disk, and so I can't show you what I was up to.

This morning, after I read the Brownings' autumn 1845 revelations to one another that (yes!) their love was mutual (yes yes!), I turned back to James Wright, whose collected poems have been on one of my bedroom's auxiliary nightstand stacks since late last year. I would like to have written this poem. I would like to have been the first to realize that "if I stepped out of my body I would break / into blossom." That's a masterful line break. Look at what it does to your understanding of his realization. (Read the whole poem, too.)

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

See how he leaves you to teeter momentarily on that idea of breaking, that idea that he might step out and simply shatter, before he takes you into the joy of his final two words? See how he creates that teetering with a line break after the very word "break"? It is a beautiful thing, in idea and in execution. It is the kind of thing to which I aspire.

Spring, cleaning.

It's true: I started cleaning this afternoon. Now I can see my bedroom floor, and many more of the dishes are clean. I can't remember exactly when I just gave up on housekeeping. Most days, I care not even a little bit. Days like today, on the other hand, I want something different. Now it's a matter of racing the clock before I switch back over to the not-caring.

The combination of quippy and peckish and downright sarcastic that I'm feeling right now signals to me in flashing lights: It's time to go to sleep. Nothing else will come of this day. Tomorrow you can go back to your eyrie, your enlarger, your excitements. For now, rest.

Yes, yes. Indeed.

I have yet to tell you about Jim, the octogenarian I met Wednesday morning at the Village Coffee Company in Granville. I've been in the process of processing what happened there since the moment he and I parted: it was such a strange glimpse into another person's life. But that's going to have to happen tomorrow, or later. I want to do him justice.

I have forgotten my words.

It's astounding to me that, despite my having been out of the classroom this semester, I still seem to have risen and fallen according to the semester's pacing--which means that today, the last day of classes, had me as giddy and distracted as my colleagues who ticked off their last sessions and meetings, one by one by one. The day's glorious weather helped, as did my having tricked myself into mowing most of the yard. What I was good for today was staying in motion, walking from one end of the village to the other, then walking its other axis, heading down to my beloved classicist friend's house for tea and Greek delight and reading about the Graces. Then walking more, back to my clean-shorn yard and my not-yet-clean-swept porch. Then off again, this time with my excellent friends to acquire Chinese food.

But now I'm back at home and uncertain of what it was I'd planned to write about today--uncertain, in fact, about whether I ever figured out any topic for the day. It was one of those good early-season days: walking for long periods of time, trying to go long distances, helped settle my heavy stomach and get some new air into this torso.

Everything has felt like a massive holding pattern for a long time now, as I've waited and waited to hear about what will happen next year. Where I'll be will, in part, determine what I'll be doing with my research work. And though I have many tasks I could take on here in the meantime, I perversely keep waiting to have the overall picture in view before tackling any small corner. It is perverse. I know better. But what's funny is that last year at this time, I was watching the chestnut candles bloom and the ferns unfurl and I was wishing my Lexingtonian friend (whose birthday it was today!) the grace and patience to let her life unfold as it was meant to. But I, like so many of us, am far better at hoping for grace and patience for others than I am at asking it for myself.

Tomorrow is the twice-yearly Gambier tradition called Dumpster Day. Anything any Gambier resident wants to throw out, s/he can throw out. No questions. Makes me want to find some things to discard. One summer when I still lived in Ithaca, we had a week during which people could put anything they wanted to get rid of out by the curb, and it would get picked up--no questions. But people were always putting things out at the curb, and other people were always scavenging those things. So I was surprised that so many houses actually had lots of things outside: couches, refrigerators, tables and lamps, rugs. Those things were the rejects of the rejected. They were third-class garbage, maybe even fourth-class: stained, broken, torn, irredeemable. So much stuff ended up on the curb that the city couldn't clean it all up in the allotted time. I think, now that I'm remembering this more deliberately, that it was all billed as a Garbage Amnesty Week or something equally strange.

Tonight, my fortune cookie told me a hopeful thing: "You are a traveler at heart. There will be many journeys." No wonder it's so discomfiting to be on pause this way.

Perhaps the last night of silence.

For now, sleep, sleep. Sleep, you, wherever you are, if you're somewhere where it would be safe to sleep. Tomorrow, I hope I'll have both things to say and time and energy to use in saying them.

Mall ducks.

Such strange things happened to me today, but the press is still on for the week, forcing me to defer telling my day's best story until tomorrow. As a placeholder, I offer you ducks. Mall ducks. A mall duck with ducklings, to be more accurate. One advantage of a weird outdoor "town centre" mall is that it makes mall ducklings possible.

And seriously? I don't think that the full picture does justice to how preternaturally cute ducklings are. It's ridiculous: I see ducklings, and I want to take care of them. And so, a detail of that shot--click to see it bigger.

The rightness of full leaves.

After hours of sunning myself outside the officehouse this afternoon, I walked across the lawn to visit the beech tree that has made appearances in the Cabinet before. This week, the tree's leaves are breaking from the spring cocoons that have contained them, whole groups of leaves pleated neatly into each tough case. I fetched my camera (and news of a massive storm system that was making its way down to us from Cleveland) and set about preserving these hairy little leaves' early days--only to get a swift reminder in the utter joy of trying to catch close-up photographs of a tree in the breeze. Repeatedly, just as I was about to release the shutter, the leaves on which I was focused danced away and then back again. In almost no time, I was laughing out loud to the tree. Someone joined me on the lawn and said, "Dare I even ask?" "I'm playing with this tree," I replied. "And is it playing back?" he asked, though he seemed skeptical when I answered in the affirmative and explained my answer.

The leaves are out and dancing all up and down my eye right now, everywhere.

The photographic results of my play are, alas, not yet processed and ready for upload; it's a busy week in Gambier, and (not least because of the storms, and not least because I was checking in with half of my excellent family tonight) I didn't make it back to the appropriate computer this evening. But you'll have a photo show very soon--for some of you, before you even know that it wasn't here before. [Et voilà! And more to come.]

Onward to May.

Overgrown haiku for the last night in April

Tonight the tree shapes green at last.
A plane spikes through a pinkening cloud.
Stone walls cast back the day’s late heat.
A bird swifts over the glowing blue,
and I cannot rest for looking.

Were I to shake this blossomed branch,
petals could fall over my arms and catch
in my hair, and I could be beloved of a poet,
could be one of those whorled women upswept
and unaware of how her strayness wounds,
how these bits of spring snow burn before
they fall to ground, all but the piece that stays.

I keep myself by knowing exactly what I know:
April’s last sunset shadows the fat leaves.
The grass sends up a scent of new mowing.
Were I to reach under this cloudied moon
to touch the dusking tree, I alone would be there.

How doth the little busy bee...

Today the sun came out, and so did all the flowers, and so did the bees, large and small. I stepped under the crabapples in front of the library and found my head in a hive, coronated by buzzings all around my ears and hair.

Once, a friend stood in a yard with other friends. They were swarmed by bees. For some reason, the bees lodged in his beard. It took them a long time to untangle those bees.

Today was a day for sunning and for greeting. I walked slowly all around town, in between my various commitments. Ambled: I ambled in those shining hours.

Harvest.

In a field between here and the grocery store, garbage has been gathering for months. In the early afternoon, just before the sun came out, a man rode across the field on a small red tractor, stopping occasionally, picking the garbage up from where the planted rows will soon be.

Up the Intensity!

Just after lunch, I saw a student I know. She was skipping down a Gambier street at high speed. "How are you?" I said. She indicated her turquoise t-shirt's message: "Up the Intensity." Today was apparently "Up the Intensity" day in Gambier. I asked her several questions in an attempt to clarify what this meant, exactly. Who sponsors such a day? And makes sure that its participants have t-shirts? All she explained was that it was arranged by some people. And that those people had to run or otherwise be vigorous all day long.

Thirty minutes later, I saw her running down the sidewalk toward the officehouse. "Up with intensity!" I called out. She looked exhausted already, and it was only 1:45 p.m. A friend showed up in a green "Up the Intensity" shirt, and they compared resting tactics: stop in several buildings along your path, since you can't run in academic buildings. Stop at the coffeeshop along your path, since you can rest there. Stopping in buildings, in fact, seemed to be the chief tactic.

Off my student ran, back into our grey and cold-ish day. Off her friend ran, into the basement for a class.