What does it mean when you dream you are driving over the Vincent Thomas bridge in a golfcart, racing to get across before the sun disappears into the ocean? And when you get there, you find yourself on a golf course, with gift stores and an industrial kitchen? And many of your AP students are working in the kitchen? And when they see you, they cheerfully suggest a game of Simon Says? So you start ordering them around: “Simon says, Eat those sugar cubes!” “Simon says, crush the ice!” “Simon says…” and you run out of things that you can tell them to do, because you realize you’re enjoying yourself a little too much, like some demented Svengali? And besides that, the sun is almost down (slowest sunset in the world), and you have to get back across the bridge because you have no headlights on your golf cart? Hmm? What kind of dream is that?

This was the dream that made me almost late for proctoring the PSAT. I had already been up and around, but just laid down again for a second, just a quick little second, to enjoy the sensation of being in bed but awake, and zingo, I fell through the bottom of consciousness and ended up on a bridge, flooring the golf cart and willing it to get up that steep expanse of bridge.

Friday at her memorial,
sundown.
Wedged in among my friends,
clutching a kleenexball, and nursing
the candle flame that the wind
incessantly snatched at –
symbol of a brief, bright life –
and the songs, the tears, the stories, the jokes,
the laughter, the crowd,
testimony to a life, a woman alive:
scholar mother, wife lover, teacher friend.
And this last lesson from Linda Evans:
go live your own big life.

I just got word that I’ve been accepted in the Masters of Library and Information Science program at SJSU — my future as a golf-club-wielding writing-teacher/ teacher-writer librarian is coming into focus. It’s an online program with some hybrid coursework (some face-time added to the online program) offered through SJSU at CSUF. Carin Meister is going through the same program and we have pledged to keep one another company and on pace.

Some of the work is conducted utilizing Second Life ; I’m pretty excited about that.

My goal is to go slow, very slow, during the school year, and to pile it on during the summer. I’d like to finish the 43 units inside of four years…11 units a year? Three units a semester during the teaching year, and 4-6 during the summer?

I’ll keep you posted. Maddy likes this vision for my future. She said, “Nothing bad ever happens in a library — except when the Colonel got hit with a candlestick…” Perhaps she’s forgotten about Columbine. It feels funny for her to be worried about me, when I’m the one who worries about her — but I guess there’s no protecting the ones we love. We all live in the same world — and the key word there is “live.”