Bless us Everyone

It is Christmas Eve, 2007.

Many times during the year which has passed I had wondered whether I'd make it to this point.

Summer was the hardest. In June I returned to my alma mater, Antioch College, in commemoration of the 20th annniversary of my graduation. I had even booked the flight to nearby Dayton for the exact date of the bidecennial. Only problem was, about a week before, the Board of Trustees surreptitiously announced that the College would close next year.

What followed is a microcosm of everything I found irresistible and immoral about Antioch. If the Trustees thought that they could slip this news through on a sleepy early summer Ohio afternoon, they were very much mistaken (and good). The Reunion drew a record turnout - there were even tent cities on campus. Something like a quarter million dollars was raised within 24 hours - ultimately, enough progress was made so that the Board reversed itself in November.

And yet, what was done in the process? Committee after committee after committee. And probably a committee on committees. I don't know what the origin of this mode of "organization" is; perhaps suspicion of solo power; perhaps fear of the fact that even in democracies, there has to be a winning and a losing side, or maybe just the idea that even the people who really don't have much to contribute to a subject beyond hearing the sound of his/her own voice need to...well, be heard.

Now it seems that "we" the alumni want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Apparently the alums themselves fractured into "moderates" and "hardliners" and now are competing with one another as to whom should deal with the administration and trustees - Great, considering that these are the people who all indications are ran the College into the ground and would like nothing more than a divided opposition.

A month after the reunion, I was planning on working late, only three days away from my planned vacation to Nova Scotia, when I was caught in the steampipe explosion just a block from my office building. Of course, and thankfully, this was no 9/11, but having heard the first-hand stories of my brother and ex-fiancee's cousin who were right there when the planes hit, the paralysis of panic was very much there...added, ironically, by a sense of certainty (proven wrong) as to what was transpiring...that Osama was at it again; or maybe Cheney was pining for the top job after all (just not needing to have to go through voters to do it). Anyway, I lost the last two days before my vacation.

Then, in Nova Scotia, I learned that my mother had suffered a stroke. Cut the trip short, and flew back (Halifax is certainly no town to get caught in during a family emergency; air fare had to be at least three times what it would have been from Toronto or Montreal). To sound unfeelingly clinical, observing a stroke is remarkable in considering an almost cybernetic quality of the human animal. My father died of a stroke five years ago next month; and that one I was very much present for - I witnessed his last words - cough, slump, two badly slurred sentences; a fading rattle to respond to the EMS attendants, and it was all over (obviously it was a left-sided stroke). Eerie, too, was speaking with my mom as she was admitted - very much in control of her faculties if not her left extremities (knowledgable to not only her time and place) - only to be back in Brooklyn 48 hours later at least temporarily not knowing who I was and for several weeks stubbornly convinced she lived in childhood digs on Staten Island. The mechanics are at the same time fascinating, demanding, and excruciating.

But I have made it - or at least seven more days and I have. Along with 1985 (which permanently established my ongoing love/hate feelings toward my alma mater now convulsing in financial coma); 1993 (a vagabond grad school dropout in a recession) and 2003 (the year of my dad's death), this is the most difficult year I've had. Notice how none of the succeeding years make that list. So '08 will be a good one. I know it. And to any reading, make these holidays and the year to come the same. Bless us Everyone.

The Brahmin